David Peat

110 From Certainty to Uncertaintyments in one area being reflected or paralleled in another. Toward theend of the nineteenth century, Georges-Pierre Seurat transformedpainting into a series of dots of pure color, almost as if in anticipationof the way Max Planck, in 1900, would transform light into individualquanta. Cubism reintroduced time into the space of the canvas just asEinstein and Mach reintegrated time and space. Two centuries earlier,while Dutch painters were exploring the way light enters a room, Newtonwas allowing a crack of light to enter his study so that he couldbreak it down with a prism. There are many more parallels that couldbe mentioned in which ideas seem to complement each other and appearat the same time in many different fields.In some cases there may exist a causal relationship between onearea and the next. When computer engineers started to display fractalforms, artists in turn began to study inner complexity and use fractalforms in their work. When the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul madean analysis of the psychology of color, Seurat immediately made use ofthese discoveries in his paintings. Yet, in many other cases, the artisticinnovation came first, or there was no direct or traceable link betweenthe innovations in art, science, and literature.How could this be? Why should so many remarkable parallels exist?I have thought about this for much of my life and sought a varietyof avenues that will “explain away” such coincidences. Finally I havebeen driven to conclude that they are the manifestations of an actualchange in human consciousness involving, for example, a change inthe way we “see” the world. At a certain point “the time was right” and“something was in the air.” Human consciousness was at a critical pointand this potentiality for change was first picked up, symbolized, andexpressed by writers, artists, and scientists in their respective fields.Rather than the one influencing the other directly each was picking upand manifesting the seeds of change.Maybe these parallel manifestations in art, science, literature, andother fields should be more properly called “synchronicities.” As Jungdefined it, a synchronicity is “the coincidence in time and space of twoor more causally unrelated events which have the same or similarmeaning” or more simply “acausal parallelisms.” In the popular imaginationsynchronicities are associated with remarkable coincidences