This was originally relegated to a tweet, but it deserves to be elevated to a blog post. Bobby McFerrin, at the World Science Festival, demonstrating the pentatonic scale. A rare combination of joy, passion, and teaching. I dare you not to smile at the 0:42 mark.
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
Too busy at the moment to provide what is traditionally known as “content.” Instead, enjoy this artistic and message-conveying video, sent by loyal reader Markus.
(found in a list compiled by one of my kids, cross referenced to the relevant page number in Roald Dahl’s “Matilda”)
Gawd I love Roald Dahl. How could you read that list and not want to know what the book was about?
(Sadly, this is exactly the sort of language that tends to be lost in the “abridged” books all to frequently passed off to children — if you have a few minutes to spare, there is a brilliant reflection on abridged children’s literature here.)
The Geostationary Banana Over Texas, that’s what! Longtime readers will recall that we love the GBOT here at Cosmic Variance. What is not to love? Just the existence of the very concept holds out promise for a brighter future. Truly, it’s projects like this that define what it means to be human.
(After all, actual bananas may soon go extinct, leaving us with only their giant inflatable brethren to remember them by.)
Now, however, Backreaction points to terrible news: the GBOT is facing a funding crisis! Artist/visionary Cesar Saez has received about $100,000 from the Canadian government, and needs to raise another $1.5 million to make his dream a reality. So far, efforts have fallen short; only $12,018 has been collected. Hey, it’s a start!
Now, some will say that the GBOT isn’t really a realistic project; that it’s more an excuse to have a cool website, generate a bit of buzz, and play with some drafting software than an honest attempt to float a banana over the Lone Star State.
Some will say that the flight plan looks more like a scribble in Microsoft Paint than a NASA-approved model of the GBOT’s trajectory.
We say, true art doesn’t listen to people like that! True art thinks those people are wankers.
Some day the GBOT will fly — if only in our hearts.
When it comes to art (considered broadly, so as to include literature and various kinds of performance, not to mention a good bottle of wine) I am a radical subjectivist. If you like it, great; if you don’t, that’s your prerogative. There is no such thing as being “right” or “wrong” in one’s opinion about a work of art; what’s important is the relationship between the work and the person experiencing it.
Nevertheless, there’s no question that one’s attitude toward a work of art can be radically changed by outside information or experiences. You might come to understand it better, or conversely you might be overexposed to it and just get bored.
Scientists, in particular, love it when they discover that some boring old art thing that they had previously perceived as undifferentiated and uninteresting actually possesses some hidden structure. If you were ever caught in the unfortunate situation of teaching an art- or film-appreciation class to scientists, the right strategy would be to reveal, insofar as possible, the underlying theories by which the work in question is constructed. And if you think there are no such theories, you’re just not looking hard enough.
Recent examples, which I would blog about in extraordinary depth and breathtaking insight (with a dash of self-deprecating humor) if I were a professional blogger rather than a scientist with a blogging hobby:
Also, of course, the assembled physicists all had a similar question: “Why don’t they make a TV show about me, or someone like me? Those people are all nerds!” I have a theory about that.
I bought this print to decorate the wall of my office. I like the art, and the title is “Time’s Arrow,” so how could I resist?
But I did have a worry: the painting clearly involved text, which I tend to think is an aesthetic mistake — it brings a depressing specificity to what should be an open-ended interpretive process. And here the resolution of the online image was too small for me to make out the words, so what if the text was completely dopey?
Now it has arrived, and here is the main text:
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
The artist never entirely knows. We guess; we may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
I kind of like it.
Edge.org has collaborated with the Serpentine Gallery in London on a fun kind of artistic event: a collections of formulas, equations, and algorithms scribbled (or typeset) on pieces of paper and hung from the gallery walls like honest-to-goodness pieces of art. I was one of the people asked to contribute, along with another blogger or two. You can check out the entries online.
Some of the entries are straightforwardly hard-core mathematical, such as the one from J. Doyne Farmer or this from Shing-Tung Yau:
Mathematical truths have a uniquely austere beauty in their own right, but the visual presentation of such results in the form of equations can be striking even if the concepts being expressed aren’t immediately accessible. (Yau is talking about Ricci Flow, a crucial element in the recent proof of the Poincare Conjecture.) Meanwhile, many of the entries take the form of metaphorical pseudo-equations, using the symbols of mathematics to express a fundamentally non-quantitative opinion (Jonathan Haidt, Linda Stone). Some of the entries are dryly LaTeXed up (David Deutsch), some are hastily scribbled (Rudy Rucker), some tell fun little stories (George Dyson), and some are painstakingly elaborate constructions (Brian Eno). Several aren’t equations at all, but take the form of flowcharts or other representations of processes, such as this from Irene Pepperberg:
My favorites are the ones that look formidably mathematical, but upon closer inspection aren’t any more rigorous than your typical sonnet, like this one by Rem Koolhaas:
Or the ones that are completely minimalistic, a la James Watson or Lenny Susskind. Note that the more dramatic your result, the more minimal you are allowed to be.
The big challenge, of course, is to choose just one equation. There are a lot of good ones out there.
In a follow-up to Julianne’s previous post on scientific communication, I thought I’d describe a lecture I attended last week. I’ll try not to say anything overly controversial (though CV readers can be a tough crowd). The talk was by Felice Frankel, as part of the Santa Fe Institute public lecture series. The title was “More than Pretty Pictures: The Power of Images in Science”. Frankel is known for her scientific photographs. She creates beautiful images of a large range of physical systems (from water droplets to nanocrystals). She’s been responsible for quite a number of cover images for journals such as Science and Nature.
Frankel spent much of her lecture discussing her philosophy in taking scientific images. This consisted mostly of comments about the power of visualization, and ideas for how to make scientific visualization more effective. She emphasized that it’s highly nontrivial to produce an image which grabs you, while simultaneously informing you about the science it’s meant to represent. Many scientific images are uninspired. Or confusing. Often both. The lecture was sprinkled liberally with her work, much of which is quite arresting. For example:
This is an image of a ferrofluid. Frankel took seven small magnets, and placed them below a glass plate with the fluid above. She then added a bright yellow Post-It note below, yielding the vivid colors. It is this last step which completely transforms the photograph, and which your average scientist would have neglected. We have much to learn in how to present our results, both within the community, and to the world at large.
Images are indeed an essential component of science. They are visceral and physical, in a way that a table of numbers cannot hope to reproduce. They allow for what Frankel terms “visual thinking”: a direct and unmediated engagement with the world. This is particularly evident in astronomy. I would argue that the Hubble Space Telescope has generated many of the most beautiful images ever produced. And an appreciation of the science underlying the images only strengthens one’s admiration. Astronomy is peculiar in that a large portion of the field is fundamentally based on pretty pictures. (Okay, some of these pictures are run through variants of prisms to produce spectra, which aren’t quite as beautiful (at least to my, untrained, eye).) Julianne is our resident expert on taking and interpreting astronomical images; I’m told it’s a little more involved than pointing a digital camera and pushing the button.
What I found most surprising about Frankel’s lecture was her repeated insistence that she is not an artist, and that her photos are not to be considered art. As she put it: “This is why I am not an artist: I am deeply committed to maintaining the integrity of the science.” In her view, because she is constrained to reproduce the world as it is, she is not allowed the free rein of an artist. Her focus is on communicating science as effectively as possible: education rather than aesthetics, meaning rather than art. I find this argument somewhat disappointing. Her most effective images are certainly art; in fact, a number of museums have added her photographs to their collections. And her ability to produce these images, without the liberty of composing unphysical scenarios, or the liberal application of photoshop, does not detract from her talents. If anything, the restricted domain in which she works emphasizes her abilities. Although the sonnet is a severely constrained form of expression, I don’t see anyone arguing that Shakespeare’s contributions don’t qualify as art.
One side-note which Frankel briefly touched upon was the issue of “true” or “accurate” representation in science. While Frankel makes an effort to maintain the essential integrity of her images, most Hubble images are somewhat enhanced (false-color). This means that, were you to manage to stick your head into the focal plane of the Hubble telescope (the fact that it’s hundreds of miles above the surface of the Earth notwithstanding), the image you would see with your eyes would look completely different from the postcards we’re all familiar with. Scientists have taken liberties with the color palette and contrast in producing the images. Often the frequencies of the light in astronomical images are well outside human experience. The human eye is a particular sensor, and there’s no reason that it “sees” the universe in a way that’s in any sense profound. For example, we don’t see infrared. If we did, a hot pan on the stove would glow as a warning, and all those times I have dropped spaghetti sauce all over the floor would have been avoided. We don’t see x-rays either (superman presumably does; but in his case his eyes must not only be sensitive to x-rays, but also emit them in the first place, since the Sun isn’t bright enough in x-rays to give him good images on Earth). There are interesting astronomical sources of light at essentially all frequencies we’ve cared to observe, and so we generate images in a tremendous range of wavelength bands. Furthermore, by playing with the contrast and color scale, we can highlight various features and structures in the images; perhaps we’d like to “see” star forming regions, or shocked gas, or interstellar dust. As a happy byproduct, we also make the images visually stunning. It’s probably not entirely happenstance that images which emphasize interesting science also happen to be more beautiful. Although you would never see the identical scene with your naked eye at a telescope, the images are no less physical or instructive. They represent good science and good aesthetics. What’s not to love?
Exactly what it says. Who needs naturally-occuring spectacles when we can create our own?
Via Cynical-C, naturally.
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
