Mr. Universe: Einstein, here by Warhol Image:© Andy Warhol Foundation

It's not just that Einstein made the universe more mysterious, she says; he made it more alien. "We have always sought explanations for what we don't understand. In some ways, our explanations have become more precise, but as they've become more precise, they've also become more specialized"--or harder for the non-specialist to fathom.

Echoes of Einstein appear in modernist writers like Virginia Woolf. At least one critic has compared Mrs. Dalloway, built on a plot that has various characters arriving at the same here and now in London, with the convergence of rays of light, each beginning at a different point in space and time.

Wald says that Gertrude Stein was obsessed with time; in her work, characters go through major life transitions, without appearing to leave the present moment. Images and phrases appear in curious juxtapositions--as in a Cubist painting by Pablo Picasso, who was in Stein's intellectual circle, or, conceptually, as with light constituting both waves and particles. "Stein was really trying to unsettle people's belief in any kind of meaning," says Wald. "She was fascinated with time, and imagined time flowing in ways that were not sequential but shaped by multiple influences and in relationship with other realms, including space. Stein tries to go backward and forward at the same time, putting time and space together both as the subject of her poetics and as a kind of formal experiment."

Science fiction is strongly suffused with Einstein's theories, Wald says. Mathematician Arlie Petters considers science fiction, which he has embraced since childhood, a major cultural force in embedding Einstein in popular consciousness. "Star Trek is one of my favorite science-fiction shows, and it has quite a bit of relativity," he says. In his undergraduate relativity class, he touches on designing futuristic spaceships that travel near the speed of light. "There is always some devoted Star Trek fan who instantly proclaims that one must use a fuel consisting of matter and anti-matter. It will produce high-energy radiation that ejects out of the warp-drive engine at the speed of light, causing the spaceship to move near the speed of light." The warp-drive idea, he says, is driven by the Theory of Special Relativity.

But science works its way into popular culture beyond literary experiments and science-fiction speculations. The experimental art of the early twentieth century, and its tendency to re-envision the conventions of representation, might seem akin to Einstein's toppling of long-held notions of physical reality. Picasso and the other Cubists were launching an attack on artistic tradition and at the same time on the forms and traditions of the larger society. As the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire put it, they were looking to "re-order the universe."

In her book Cubism and Culture (co-authored with Duke art historian Mark Antliff), Patricia Leighten, chair of art and art history at Duke, writes about the world of ideas that gave rise to Cubism--the same world of ideas that helped inspire Einstein. Leighten credits art historian Linda Henderson, of the University of Texas at Austin, with disproving a straight-line trajectory between relativity and Cubism; Einstein was dismissive of such a correlation, insisting that relativity doesn't rely on "a multiplicity of systems of coordinates," and so "is quite different [from] Picasso's painting." But the two paths to understanding the universe, scientific and artistic, had similar intellectual origins.

Both Einstein and the Cubists were influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson and the mathematician Henri PoincarÈ, who argued that the human experiences of time and space were not objective and rational--that they were not uniform for everybody. Such celebrations of subjective experience resulted in three interrelated artistic innovations, Leighten says: the "deformation" of objects in terms of size, shape, and scale; a rejection of Renaissance perspective in favor of "multiple views" and the use of all the senses in apprehending the world; and the conjunction of disparate images in a single composition.

A theorized black hole in space Image:© CORBIS

Cubism is important, Leighten says, for enshrining subjective perspective in twentieth-century art--much as Einstein validated the importance of the observer in science. Artists like Picasso and Georges Braque tried to "depict their simultaneous experiences of different views of an object or different aspects of prior knowledge about an object," she says. That is, they incorporated multiple frames of reference, along with materials taken from multiple sources, into a single work. Cubist collage might be the ultimate achievement of the Cubist movement, and it is powerfully "reflective of a world undergoing radical change," she says. The idea of cutting, pasting, assembling, and reassembling a picture of the world from fragments is "an act of liberation" from the conventional notion of naturalistic painting, she says.

Einstein was never comfortable with the physics of probability; he never quite reconciled himself to a probabilistic universe--even as he provided the platform for science to take the leap into quantum physics. Similarly, says Leighten, Picasso helped launch art into the age of abstraction, though pure abstraction, or non-objectivity, was never his aim. An artist like Kazimir Malevich, who reduced painting to white geometric shapes, or Piet Mondrian, whose canvases are laid out as bold lines and colors trapped within those lines, would have been unthinkable without Picasso and the other Cubists. Still, Picasso sought a certain anchoring in subjects and themes, just as Einstein sought the guiding order of a universe that runs according to rules. Picasso's personal collection of art included Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Braque--all of whom were revolutionary in their ideas about color and composition, but none of whom quite crossed the border into pure abstraction.

Crossing the border as it does between visual art and movement through space, dance, of all the arts, may have the most tantalizingly close ties to relativity. For the Einstein centennial year, the Institute of Physics in Britain commissioned a dance company to produce a new work based on Einstein's theories. Merce Cunningham, the choreographer, has quoted Einstein's observation that "there are no fixed points in space." He goes on to express fascination with stage space that lacks any fixed points so that "wherever you are...could be a center."

Barbara Dickinson, director of the Dance Program at Duke, sees Cunningham's choreography as linked with the frame-of-reference issues that interested Einstein. Before Cunningham, she says, many choreographers were presenting "a very defined idea that they wanted the audience to get. Cunningham steps way back from this. His stated creed is that there need not be meaning in movement; it is purely movement in space and time."

The dance universe as Cunningham conceived it is full of chance encounters--he would sometimes hinge artistic decisions on rolls of the dice--and indeterminacy. "This element of indeterminacy is extremely difficult to do in performance," says Dickinson. "He would say to the dancers, okay, you can go out and face any direction you want, not necessarily paying attention to the audience out front. Or he'd give them leeway about when they entered the stage and how long they stayed out there." And his dances would accommodate multiple points of view. In one example, "Walkaround Time," choreographed in 1968, the dancers--not the audience members--are given an intermission. "At intermission, they stopped dancing and basically did whatever they wanted," says Dickinson. "Some lolled on stage, some disappeared for ten minutes, but the audience was watching, creating something from this found movement."

In Cunningham's work, then, the flow from movement to movement may be warped rather than linear, subject to quick changes and jerky shifts: By analogy, this is the quantum universe, the universe of random motion. And what is communicated is in large part determined by the observer: This is the universe of special relativity, where the passage of time is a function of factors unique to the observer.