Art Meets Science

Some art history scholars believe that Dali's melting clocks may symbolize Albert Einstein's groundbreaking Theory of Relativity, a new and revolutionary idea back in the 1930s. In his Theory of Relativity, Einstein proposed a new concept of time. According to Einstein’s theory, time is a relative and complex concept that cannot be tracked with such a crude, simple gadget as a clock or a pocket watch. In The Persistence of Memory, Dali’s clocks might be melting away because they are outmoded and losing power over the world around them. Limp and increasingly ineffectual.