In Gratitude

Henrike Holdrege

From In Context #36 (Fall, 2016) | View article as PDF

I met Georg Maier for the first time in 1981 during a course for young science teachers in Stuttgart, Germany. In one particular class session he laid out for me — as I now know — the foundation for a radical transformation in my approach to optics and the phenomena of the visual world, and, more generally, to all of natural science.

What did we do that afternoon? Imagine a group of young teachers and students sitting in a circle in an otherwise bare room with just one rather small, rectangular window. Georg asks us to pay attention to the various shades of darkness and brightness on walls and ceiling. It is dark in that corner up there and much brighter here on the wall opposite the window.  We learn to see the window from any spot in the room in its visual size and shape: either we walk to a spot and look at the window from there, or we imagine it as seen from that spot. From the dark corner, the window appears as a thin sliver; from the wall opposite, it is a much larger rectangle.

Why were these simple observations — led by a highly trained physicist — so powerful for me? Through my middle school, high school, and college education I habitually explained and understood optical phenomena in the usual ways: I referred shadow, mirror, and refraction phenomena to the ray model of light; diffraction, polarization and color phenomena to the wave theory; and I grasped other phenomena, such as light absorption or emission, with the aid of quantum mechanics. In this one afternoon session, Georg introduced us to an experience and understanding of illumination that made no use of any of these conceptual frameworks. Rather, we looked and learned to see.

When we planned the new addition to the building of The Nature Institute in 2011, I made use of what I had learned that day in Stuttgart. I poured over the completed architectural drawings and imagined the illumination of each room. That our staircase and downstairs foyer today has good daylight owes to the fact that I then discovered the need for another window, and we changed the plans.

From that first meeting with Georg, it was for me a long path to unlearn what I had learned before. In the early years of The Nature Institute, I began working with Georg’s book Optik der Bilder, which was first published in 1986. This book was a last minute purchase before I emigrated to the United States 24 years ago. It stayed put on my book shelf until after The Nature Institute was founded in 1998. With the help of this book — and with the help of other authors, Goethe being one of them — I found a new relationship to the visual world and its many manifestations that has been continuously nourished by growing interest and joyful wonder, new observations and discoveries, and a deepening understanding.

This work has led to numerous workshops and courses at The Nature Institute and elsewhere in the past decade. I hear from participants how their interest is roused and eyes are opened, and a respectful and joyful experience of the colorful world is called forth. That is not a small thing. It can be life-giving.

I am deeply glad that Georg knew that his life’s work was bearing fruit in America — for instance also in the work and teachings of his colleague Michael D’Aleo, a physics teacher and trainer of physics teachers. As a teacher himself, Georg was not always easy to understand; it was often difficult to appreciate what he was pointing to. His above-mentioned book, like others of his published writings, is not an easy read. But it is worth the effort.

Listen to a conversation with Henrike Holdrege about Georg Maier.