Race for the Higgs

Particle physicists may often feel like their lives are part of a game of chance: A roll of the dice determines whether they will find the data they need to discover the Higgs particle--or whether their accelerator will even run at all. Nonetheless, the fun of the chase to uncover the nature of reality is worth it. That’s the take of particle physicist Ben Still at Queen Mary University, London and artist Natalie Kay-Thatcher, at least. Together they have designed a board game, “Race for the Higgs”, that captures some of the luck involved in scientific discoveries.

The board game is one of many pieces of physics-based art that were on show at the Jiggling Atoms exhibition in London, earlier this month. Paintings, sculptures, models, comic strips, and sound pieces were also on display. Some of the artists who contributed to the exhibition, and the physicists who ran a lecture series to introduce them to some advanced concepts in quantum theory and particle physics, were kind enough to speak to me about the goals of this science-art collaboration, which was originally conceived by Kay-Thatcher, for the October 2012 podcast.

Physics can be such an abstract, mathematical science, that it’s often difficult for physicists themselves to visualize the concepts they use everyday in their research. Is it possible to have a clear picture of a wavefunction, for instance? We often talk about ideas that are in tension--objects that behave as both waves and particles, for instance--and which defy our intuition. (See, for instance, “Time Dilation Gets a Quantum Twist.”) So perhaps, physics, more than the other sciences, is ideally suited for interpretation by artists, who earn their crust by by striving to bring out the hidden essence of their subjects.

Paintings by Penny Klein

Artist Penny Klein chose to tackle competing and contradictory views of the atom. She painted two versions of the same hilltop and lakeside landscape: The first represents the chaotic quantum randomness that governs the atom, while the second, is a more ordered visualization that encourages you to contemplate the mathematical structure of physical laws underpinning objects. Her two pieces complement each other, lying on either side of the quantum-classical divide. You can listen to her describing what inspired her on the podcast.

Three pegboards created by Peter Nencini

Others chose to represent the act of doing physics itself. One of the defining features of the scientific method, which struck artist Peter Nencini, is that it is an ongoing endeavor, creating a continuing body of knowledge, with old ideas giving way to new, in light of experimental evidence. At the start of the exhibition, Nencini’s installation consisted of 12 empty pegboards, hung along a wall. Each day, Nencini continued to listen to introductory physics lectures by Still and others (which are available on the Jiggling Atoms website), and added pieces to the pegboards to reflect what he had learned. He also talks about his evolving piece of art on the podcast.

Bruno, Menocchio and Galileo, by Zeel

Historically, this aspect of science has at times clashed with religion because it challenges the acceptance of given truths. In one of my favorite pieces, artist Zeel tells the story of one of the lesser known figures at the centre of one of such conflict: Menocchio, a medieval Italian miller who read 11 books during his life and pondered about how the world came into being. His unconventional views on cosmology--including the notion that angels were created from the bulk of earth, air, fire and water, like worms emerging from rotting cheese--led to him being put on trial for heresy and burned at the stake. Zeel delightfully models his figure along with cheese and worms, flanked by two more famous thinkers, astronomers Galileo Galilei and Giordarno Bruno, who also clashed with the Church. (String theorist and FQXi-member Brian Greene, among others, has compared the multiverse to swiss cheese; so Menocchio, despite being a peasant rather than a scientist, may have been on to something!) Zeel’s work celebrates this capacity for human ingenuity and wittily compares his “cheese and worms” cosmology with modern scientific views in a vibrant cartoon that accompanies the sculpture. The artist notes that Galileo and Bruno would probably not have been aware of Menocchio. I like to think that if they were alive today, all three could each have entered the FQXi essay contest, Questioning the Foundations, and debated their ideas on this site.

Menocchio's cosmology by Zeel

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The Jiggling Atoms exhibition ran from 1 - 7 October 2012, in London, UK. Visit jigglingatoms.org for more information about the artists involved.

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It is interesting this contact between art and science.

I see the advanced theorical research like an artist expression: there is nothing before, there is a sense after the creation; moreover the instant of throw down in the idea (artistic and scientific) is equal.

The common people refuse the numerical theories of the physics, and it is difficult to appeal the youngs and well-reads; then can be useful for the scientific community (to gain respect and neighborhood from the people) the artistic expression to make simple sense (skipping years of intermediate steps) of the research.

Saluti

Domenico

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Zeeya, thanks for this.

I took a look at the jiggling atoms site.There is one picture by Jack Hughes that I really like. Shows lots of figures that appear to be thinking but all on separate fragments of world. Which seems to be saying something about the isolation of subjective experience and thought, giving the fragmentation of the world into those individual personal realities. Having seen the wide diversity of thought that emerged in answer to the essay competition question it seems an insightful illustration. I would quite like another version in which some of the figures are holding hands and pulling their pieces of the fragmented whole together, maybe even building bridges.

I wonder whether having artists learn about physics and illustrating it is the best way around. Wouldn't it be interesting to have physicist learn about and carry out various forms of artistic expression to show what they are thinking about? It overrides the necessity to express the ideas with language, which is still the left hemispheres territory, and might still be hard to fathom. Art though appeals to the right hemisphere which deals with the association of concepts, bringing ideas together. It wouldn't then be about artists tying to express physics but physicist finding alternative ways to communicate their ideas that may give some extra insight, maybe even revelation, to themselves as well as others.

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Thanks Zeeya for reporting on this interesting foray into the art of physics or is it the physics of art? As both an artist and physicist I know there must be a connection somewhere but it is hard to pinpoint in words or even images. At least being an artist helped me illustrate my physics papers, one of them in the current FQXI contest. Another FQXI contest paper was written by the world-famous sculptor Kenneth Snelson and both his physics and his art are beautiful.

Have you read two fascinating books that relate to this? Einstein Picasso by Arthur I Miller and Art and Physics by Leonard Shlain.

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Slit camera 'time' images by Jay Mark Johnson

Quote: "an object is registered by the rate of movement as opposed to distance or size so that viewing the image from the left side is effectively viewing backward in time"........... "The slit camera in a fixed-position registers only a moment of a scene - represented visually by a vertical sliver. Over a period of time, which Johnson can control, the photographic method records line after line of his moving subject - resulting in a composite series of strips. this means that an object taking a long time to pass the lens would appear stretched across the canvas, whereas a fast moving subject would appear scrunched up. Johnson says he wants to expand our view of reality through his work, describing the philosophy behind the concept:'it shows us that what we see is a product of our cultural traditions and means of perception.' " Designboom.com 6th Oct 2012

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What is Art?

The writing are spoken words in history.

Art is a human intellectual work without writing: poetry is recited words, only remembered with writing (the "books" of Fahrenheit 451).

Music is not the sheet music, it is the performance; poetry is not writing, it's recitation.

The work of art is prior to writing (the last true poet was Homer?), so if this is true, then any work of art must be free of writing in its execution, then the film is nothing more than the remember of the theater, such as writing is the memory of a poem.

A work of art is any human work whose meaning is not immediate (a landscape is not a work of art, but a picture of a landscape is), you need a cultural interpretation.

A sculpure, which is simply a copy of a natural object is not art, unless with the copy you want convey a particular idea (natural beauty, etc.).

The work of art (like poetry) were born at the time when there was no writing, so the only possible cultural transmission was mediated by the work of art (and the skill of the artist was enrich the work of depth).

What we create physical, are abstract concept related to the natural world, and as such have a considerable amount of information, meaning, history, culture and poetry, and the same can be said of philosophy, or of human history: painter often use historical facts in their represantion, as it is a means of transmitting non-verbal (is the transmission of an idea), a story to interpret (the meaning is not immediate but mediated by an historicized culture): a modern person can not interpret a work of a people exinct, with a unknow culture, even if they feel the depth, and the reverberation of the meanings).

So any cultural setting, and therefore also the scientific, can be a source of inspiration of art: it is a waste not to use a source of thousand of centuries of a single human thinking, because all is lost if it is not shared.

Saluti

DOmenico

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