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Tag archives: art and science
CMS on canvas
Collage of the CMS detector at CERN created by Genevieve Lovegrove.
By Michael Banks
We’ve already had a LEGO model of the giant CMS detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) but now University of Leicester modern literature student Genevieve Lovegrove has attempted to go one better by creating a collage of the LHC detector made from everyday objects.
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Using pictures to describe light
“Bullseye sky” by Michael Berry.
By Kate Gardner
“Pictures convey abstract concepts to each other and to ourselves,” explained Michael Berry last night in his talk “Optica Fantastica: Nature’s optics and our understanding of light” here at IOP Publishing in Bristol as part of the city’s Festival of Ideas. Berry, who is the Melville Wills emeritus professor of physics at the University of Bristol, began by declaring that he was going to take the “opposite approach to Einstein”. Whereas Einstein said, “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest is just detail”, Berry is interested in those details.
Sponsored by the Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World, the talk was held to celebrate the International Year of Light 2015 and in it Berry ran the audience through the four levels of understanding light: rays, waves, polarization and quantum. He showed beautiful pictures from his own research but also included some artworks related to the phenomena he was explaining and even quoted passages from novels.
Immersive art, physics pumpkins, personalizing Thor’s hammer and more
By Matin Durrani
If you’ve ever been to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, you’ll know that blackboards are everywhere. You can find them in handy little alcoves, in the cafe and even in the institute’s lifts – the idea being that brain-box theorists who have a great idea in their heads can crack off the underlying maths before their thought fizzles into the aether. (Not that there is an aether, of course, but you know what I mean.) Anyway, the institute’s new California-based artist-in-residence Alexa Meade, has taken the idea to a new level, creating a huge 3D living chalkboard to create the “perception-bending art for which she is internationally renowned”. As you can see from the video above, it brings a whole new dimension to the idea of getting “immersed” into science. You can see more images of Meade’s living installation at Perimeter on Flickr.
This week, China’s president, Xi Jinping, is on a state visit to the UK, and today he toured the new National Graphene Institute (NGI) at the University of Manchester. We reported on the planned tour yesterday, with our story including a special behind-the-scenes video that Physics World recorded on our own recent visit to the NGI in the company of its architect and desinger Tony Ling. But an interesting nugget about the Chinese visit has since emerged: it appears that Kostya Novoselov, the Nobel-prize-winning Manchester physicist who helped to isolate graphene for the first time, has presented President Xi “with a gift of traditional Chinese-style artwork, which Kostya himself had painted using graphene paint”. We’ve yet to see what this objet d’art looks like, but I’m sure it’s lovely.
Quantifying the success of public engagement
Measuring up – how does one evaluate the success of outreach projects such as the dance Constant Speed? (Courtesy: Anthony Crickway)
By Matin Durrani
Here in the Physics World office our attention was caught last week by a story in the Times Higher Education. It reported on a lecture given by Simon Singh at the 2:AM conference in Amsterdam, in which the broadcaster, author and former particle physicist criticized some projects that are designed to boost the public’s interest in science, but which, he feels, are not value for money.
The story mentioned several projects facing Singh’s ire, one of which was the 2005 dance Constant Speed that was created to mark the centenary of Einstein’s annus mirabilis. It was commissioned by the Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World, so naturally Singh’s comments piqued my interest.
Juggling Newton’s cradles, physics poetry, the birth of exoplanetary research and more
By Tushna Commissariat
We get many exciting, interesting and sometimes strange e-mails in our Physics World inbox on a weekly basis. But we were pleasantly surprised to receive one from Jay Gilligan – a professor of juggling at the University of Dance and Circus in Stockholm, Sweden. Together with one of his former students, Erik Åberg, he has perfected the art of juggling with giant Newton’s cradles. While juggling undoubtedly involves a lot of physics – everything from air resistance, speed, velocity and of course gravity comes into play – this takes it to an even more physical, if you will excuse the pun, level. Do watch the video above to see all of the amazing tricks that the duo can do, and try them for yourself if you are dexterous enough.
Black-hole Sun, ticking clocks, coffee-stain avalanches and more
“Eclipse Totality over Sassendalen” by Luc Jamet.
(Courtesy: Luc Jamet/RAS)
By Michael Banks and Tushna Commissariat
It’s that time of the year again when the Royal Observatory Greenwich announces the winners of its Astronomy Photographer of the Year award and releases some of the most wonderful and awe-inspiring celestial images. Pictured above is this year’s overall winning image – titled “Eclipse Totality over Sassendalen” and taken by French photographer Luc Jamet, this stunning skyscape was taken from Svalbard during the total solar eclipse that took place earlier this year. “It is one of those heart-stoppingly beautiful shots for which you feel grateful to the photographer for sharing such an exceptional moment,” says Melanie Vandenbrouck, who was one of the judges. If you are in London, then you can drop in to the observatory to see the full exhibition , which opens today, and you can see all the winning images online.
While you’re admiring pictures, do take a look at the latest images of Pluto – backlit by the Sun and showing off its many rugged mountains and icy planes – taken by the New Horizons probe. The pictures are eerily similar to something you would see at the poles of our very own planet, while still maintaining its alien air.
Dismaland physics, laboratory photowalks and more
By James Dacey and Tushna Commissariat
While it may seem as if we Physics World journalists spend our evenings leafing through Newton’s Principia Mathematica or deriving the Dirac equation from first principles, on Wednesday night this week, a few of us visited Dismaland – the pop-up “bemusement park” curated by the elusive British street artist Banksy. Located in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare – a few miles south-west of the Physics World Bristol HQ – Dismaland offers a darker and more politically motivated alternative to Mickey Mouse and his friends. While our visit was not work-related, there were a few unexpected physics references that we couldn’t help but spot. First we stumbled across “The Astronauts’ Caravan”, a humorous take on the flight simulators used by NASA (see video above).
Created in 2011 by artists and engineers Tim Hunkin and Andy Plant, the outwardly unimpressive-looking theme-park ride is a compact version of the Victorian “haunted swing” illusion. We won’t spoil the magic by explaining the mechanics of the ride here, but you can read this blog by Hunkin where he explains exactly how he and Plant built their spinning caravan and if you can’t visit Dismaland, then watch the video to see what it looks like from the inside.
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Moving meridians, Stradivarius violins, sunspots and more
Walk the line: Airy meridian is marked as the “Prime Meridian of the World” (dotted line), and the modern reference meridian indicating zero longitude using GPS (solid line).
(Courtesy: 2014 Google Maps, Infoterra & Bluesky)
By Tushna Commissariat
A visit to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich is incomplete without walking along the Prime Meridian of the world – the line that literally divides the east from the west – and taking some silly photos across it. But you may be disappointed to know that the actual 0° longitudinal line is nearly 100 m away, towards the east, from the plotted meridian. Indeed, your GPS would readily show you that the line actually cuts through the large park ahead of the observatory. I, for one, am impressed that the original line is off by only 100 m, considering that it was plotted in 1884. A recently published paper in the Journal of Geodesy points out that with the extreme accuracy of modern technology like GPS, which has replaced the traditional telescopic observations used to measure the Earth’s rotation, we can measure this difference. You can read more about it in this article in the Independent.
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Faraday explodes in court, NIST is entangled in dance, and Oliver Sacks’ periodic table
By Hamish Johnston and Michael Banks
You may remember back in 2013 when researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US entangled the motion of a tiny mechanical drum with a microwave field for the first time ever. Not content with that feat, NIST physicist Ray Simmonds, who was involved in the work, has now made a dance about it (but no song, yet). Teaming up with choreographer Sam Mitchell, the duo has created a modern dance piece entitled Dunamis Novem (“The chance happening of nine things”). Featuring four dancers, their movements are based on nine quantized energy levels of a harmonic oscillator – like the microscopic drum in the NIST work. For each level, Mitchell created corresponding dance actions, while Simmonds created a random-number generator – to add some “quantum randomness” – for the sequence of levels that the dancers perform at. If the dancers happen to touch each other, their actions become synchronized, which can then only be broken by a beam of light – demonstrating that a measurement collapses the entanglement.
NIST has published a Q&A with Mitchell and Simmonds with links to videos of the dance and the animations of the corresponding energy levels of the harmonic oscillator. A video of the first half of Dunamis Novem is shown above and a video of the entire dance is also available.
Converging streams, secret science and more
By Tushna Commissariat
Regular readers will know that Physics World‘s Hamish Johnston and Louise Mayor will be attending the “Convergence” conference at the Perimeter Institute in Canada from tomorrow onwards. While the conference will undoubtedly prove exciting – just look at this list of speakers – it looks like the institute already has convergence on its mind as this month’s Slice of PI contemplates the “converging streams” of art and science. The video above features Perimeter researcher and artist Alioscia Hamma, who finds solace and symmetry in both his art and physics. Watch the video and read more about his work on the Perimeter blog.
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