Ideas about the connection of earthly phenomena with cosmic ones permeate the entire history of humanity. Star cults of deep antiquity, lunar-solar myths of later times, the Hellenic teaching about the "cosmos," and the ideas of the Buddhist East about the infinity of the living world in time and space gradually led human thought to the famous discoveries of the 16th–18th centuries.
For centuries, the efforts of astronomers and mathematicians, philosophers and poets, merged together, revealing an increasingly coherent and majestic picture of the universe. To the modern man, familiar with the theories of Copernicus and Kepler, the utopias of Swift and Cyrano de Bergerac, the social treatises of Fourier, and the poems of Milton, the world of many worlds—the universe—opened up. But what united them? And what was the connection between man himself, earthly matter, and the cosmos? Fontenelle's book "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds," published at the end of the 17th century, became a bedside book for thinkers of several generations. Not only Kant or Laplace, Arrhenius or Flammarion, but also Wells, Nikolai Fedorov, Bryusov, each in his own way, tried to establish the cosmic interconnectedness of life's phenomena.
Natural philosophical concepts could not be a reliable and long-lasting support; they needed theoretical rethinking and practical confirmation. In Newton's works, the universe first appeared as a coherent cosmic mechanism, all parts of which were connected by the law of universal gravitation. "By the early 19th century, Schelling, relying on the latest achievements of then scientific and philosophical thought, formulated the concept of the unity of nature. Then Hegel set this giant realm of the 'absolute idea' in motion, considering all phenomena of life dialectically, that is, from the perspective of their internal connection. However, only a few were able to take the next step and recognize the unity of the world in its materiality.
Today, we could put this classic Marxist aphorism as an epigraph to a number of outstanding scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
From antiquity to the Middle Ages, the scheme of the entire universe could be easily depicted in a graphic drawing with a pen on the margins of a manuscript. In the 16th–19th centuries, the picture of the universe became more complex, acquiring, figuratively speaking, color, volume, and the strict composition of baroque-classical painting. In the 20th century, Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and a whole galaxy of other outstanding scientists introduced entirely new elements into this picture: dynamic pictoriality based on Hubble's effects, universal scale, and the complex, unfolding in time harmony of three-dimensional Friedman worlds, flying in four-dimensional spaces at the speed of light...
But still, science cannot be called omnipotent: both before and now, the scientist often ventures into unknown realms of knowledge following the philosopher, writer, and artist. Here is a statement by the contemporary Soviet biochemist K. P. Florensky: "The same reality, approaching scientific truth, can take the form of a poetic picture, a religious myth, or a natural philosophical abstraction in the consciousness of generations, depending on the level of societal development."
Young Moscow artist N. Yakimova is a trained scientist-astronomer. For her, turning to the language of art is a continuation of the "mental experiment" that is common in theoretical work. Her drawings lack the usual scientific-fantastic plot. They are not always "pictorial hypotheses" either. Their essence lies in reflecting on the world using line and color. This is a special kind of creativity, a scientific-artistic reflection not on a "blank sheet" of paper or canvas, but on a piece of "living substance," in this case, wood. The artist lets us feel that the dead rigidity of the material is only apparent and that it is capable of "awakening" the dormant, hidden life of the substance, seeing its contours elusive to the direct eye. The drawing becomes a field of convergence and mutual reflection of the vanishingly vast and the invisibly small worlds. The human eye—this contemplative brain—sees as if under a giant magnification of both a telescope and a microscope simultaneously, how stars—cepheids, pulsars flare up, light shines, and darkness yawns inside the "animated matter." "Life is a universal phenomenon; it is the result of the interaction of the macro- and microcosm"—this is how one could translate from the language of art the summary of theories proposed by the artist, the great Soviet scientist, the founder of biogeochemistry V. I. Vernadsky. "Living matter," which is the bearer of higher forms of intelligent life, is condensed cosmic energy, filling the entire universe. Only the dead is separated, everything living is connected, so the artist carefully overlays the found "template" of the microcosm onto the outlines of the galactic worlds, refining their contours. And here, the hidden meaning of the chosen "thing" is finally revealed. This meaning becomes apparent, becomes an art phenomenon. The image is taken out of the specific frames of time and space and becomes applicable to worlds of all dimensions.
Life cannot exist outside the aesthetic harmony of all its forms. And we begin to understand that the sought unity of the universe cannot but manifest itself in the unity of the living beauty of the universe, in the unity of all the spiritualized "living substance" of the world of Man and Reason.
VALERY KLENOV