Science and religion are often portrayed as enemies, however, if an evil mastermind wanted to take over the world, he/she would best be served by utilizing the two institutions, simultaneously because their combined power would be earth shattering.
The frenemy (friend-enemy) relationship between science and religion is portrayed in Dali’s Corpus Hypercubus painting. The cross on which christ is hung is made up of hypercubes whose presense in higher dimensions cannot be easily perceived by the human eye. Looking at the painting from different angles exposes completely different views and meanings. The woman in the picture is Dali’s wife and can be construed as a religous observer and a scientific skeptic.
I had been surprised to come upon this painting at the Met because I had just seen it in Michio Kaku’s book, “Hyperspace. A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the 10th dimension,” on my train ride there. The difficulty that people face in seeing higher dimension was explained by an effective analogy. Flatlanders are people who live in two dimensions so that when a person from our world peels them off the page, they enter the third dimension only be leaving their previous two behind. Similarly, we are stuck on a ‘flat page’ of three dimensions and can’t visualize the higher ones. This doesn’t mean, however, that they don’t exist. Luckily, our human minds are at least capable of the mathematics to prove it.
See the link below for a cool demonstration:
http://gogeometry.com/wonder_world/salvador_dali_hypercube_golden_rectangle.html
