1922: The Birth of Now

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Matthew Sweet investigates objects and events from 1922, the crucial year for modernism.

Matthew Sweet investigates objects and events from 1922, the crucial year for modernism, that have an impact today.

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1922: The Birth of Now: Einstein, relativity, time, and indigenous Australian modernism

Einstein, relativity, time, and indigenous Australian modernism

BBC Radio 4 - 1922: The Birth of Now, Einstein, relativity, time, and indigenous Australian modernism

Einstein's ideas about time and parallels with the indigenous Australian conception of it.

In 1922, Albert Einstein wins the Nobel Prize and Easy Lessons in Einstein is published. Time  is shown to be relative - as it is in the indigenous Australian experience.

1922: The Birth of Now - Ten programmes in which Matthew Sweet investigates objects and events from 1922, the crucial year for modernism, that have an impact today.

10. Einstein, relativity, time, and indigenous Australian art.

In 1922, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize. In that same year, his work was popularised with the publication of Easy Lessons in Einstein. Time was shown to be a relative quality - and there is a link here to the indigenous Australian conception of time, which is also not a constant. 

In the concluding episode of the series Matthew hears from the theoretical physicist Fay Dowker, who expains relativity and Margo Neale, Senior Indigenous Curator at the National Museum of Australia. Margo speaks about Australian aboriginal ideas of time, their relationship with Einstein's idea of relativity, and the expression of these in recent indigenous art, by painters such as Mick Kurbarkku, who was born in 1922, and Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Both have been described as aboriginal modernists.   

Producer: Julian May

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1922: The Birth of Now

Einstein, relativity, time, and indigenous Australian modernism

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