An April 15, 2024 news item on phys.org announces research into how an Arab scientist’s studies into optics established the basis for modern day physics,
Scientists from the University of Sharjah [United Arab Emirates] and the Warburg Institute [University of London, UK] are poring over the writings of an 11th-century Arab-Muslim polymath to demonstrate their impact on the development of optical sciences and how they have fundamentally transformed the history of physics from the Middle Ages up to modern times in Europe.
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Caption: Ibn al-Haytham (“Alhasen”) on the left pedestal of reason [while Galileo is on the right pedestal of the senses] as shown on the frontispiece of the Selenographia (Science of the Moon; 1647) of Johannes HeveliusIbn al-Haytham (“Alhasen”) on the left pedestal of reason [while Galileo is on the right pedestal of the senses] as shown on the frontispiece of the Selenographia (Science of the Moon; 1647) of Johannes Hevelius Credit: Public domain provided by the author
A May 6, 2024 University of Sharjah press release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, delves further into the topic, Note 1: Why there’s such a large discrepancy in the publication dates for the press release is a mystery to me; Note 2: Links have been removed,
Their research focuses on the legacy of al-Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham known in Latin as “Alhazen” and particularly his most influential work titled Book of Optics, reputed in Arabic as Kitab al-Manazir and first circulated in Europe via its Latin translation dubbed ‘Perspectiva’. Ibn al-Haytham was born in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in 965 during the Abbasid Caliphate.
The divisions IV-V of this authoritative book have been recently translated into English from Arabic and published by the Warburg Institute under the title “The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, Books IV–V: On Reflection and Images Seen by Reflection”. Having already rendered divisions I-III into English, the Warburg Institute is bringing together a wide-ranging network of scientists “for a collaborative humanities-science investigation of [Ibn] al-Haytham and the questions his work provokes.“
The role of Alhazen [Ibn al-Haytham] in these processes is simultaneously well-known, but limited; only half of his scientific works have English translation and a quarter are not yet edited.”
Introducing the new translation, the Warburg Institute describes Ibn al-Haytham as “perhaps the greatest mathematician and physicist of the medieval Arabic/Islamic world. His reputation is based not only on the vast amount of material he was able to process, but also on his rigorous scientific methodology.
“He (Ibn al-Haytham) deals with both the mathematics of rays of light and the physical aspects of the eye in seven comprehensive books. His reinstatement of the entire science of optics sets the scene for the whole of the subsequent development of the subject … influencing figures such as William of Ockham, [Johannes] Kepler, [René] Descartes, and Christaan Huygens.”
Professor Nader El-Bizri of Sharjah University’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences has just published an academic review of the Warburg Institute’s translation of Ibn al-Haytham. The article, printed in the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, highlights the strong influence the Arab-Muslim optical scientist has exerted over the ages up to the present day.
Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics, Prof. El-Bizri writes, “constituted a monumental foundational opus in the history of science and the visual arts from the Middle Ages to the early modern period in the European milieu and the Islamicate context … The reception of Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics in the European milieu took place from the High Middle Ages via Gerard of Cremona’s Toledo circle in terms of its Latinate translations, and subsequent influence on Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit opticians across Europe.“
It influenced François d’Aguilon’s Opticorum libri sex within the Antwerp Jesuit mathematical school and had a direct impact on Johannes Hevelius’s Selenographia. The Optics was also consulted by Girard Desargues, René Descartes, Johannes Kepler and Christaan Huygens.”
Prof. El-Bizri works closely with the Warburg Institute assisting its attempts to reintroduce Ibn al-Haytham to the west. “A remarkable thinker, not only did Ibn al-Haytham revolutionize optical thought by mathematising its study, [but] his thinking also went on to have similar revolutionary effects in medieval Europe.”
The Warburg Institute is investing in rendering the writings of Ibn al-Haytham on optics into English, which Prof. El-Bizri describes as “voluminous”. “Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics indicates with evidence the impact of Arabic sciences and philosophy on the history of science and the architectural and visual arts in Europe, as well as demonstrating how science and the arts influence each other in the manner the studies of optics in their mathematized physics inspired the invention of projective geometric constructions of perspective as a novel Renaissance method of painting and architectural design.”
Prof. El-Bizri adds “The impact of this book is fundamental not only in the history of science from the High Middle Ages till the early-modern period in Europe, but it was also foundational for architecture and the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance and up till the late Baroque era. Moreover, it has further significance in modern conceptions of the mathematization of physics, the reliance on experimentation in science, and the philosophical analysis of perception.”
Asked about the importance of translating Ibn al-Haytham into English despite the lapse of nearly 1000 years, Prof. El-Bizri says the Arab-Muslim scientist’s theories and methodologies, specifically those dealing with optics are still considered “seminal” in the literature. Ibn al-Haytham has had a “foundational impact on the history of science and the arts in Europe.”
The influence of Ibn al-Haytham’s writings in the European milieu, according to Prof. El-Bizri, cannot be overlooked. The Arab-Muslim scientist had “a notable effect on Biagio Pelacani da Parma’s Questiones super perspectiva communi, Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentarii, culminating in the first printed Latin version in the publication of Friedrich Risner’s Opticae thesaurus in the sixteenth century.“
Then, in the seventeenth century, it influenced François d’Aguilon’s Opticorum libri sex within the Antwerp Jesuit mathematical school and had a direct impact on Johannes Hevelius’s Selenographia.”.
In the Book of Optics, notes Prof. El-Bizri, Ibn al-Haytham establishes an “inventive and precise scientific experimental method (al-iʿtibār al-muḥarrar) with its controlled verificative repeated testing, as framed by isomorphic compositions between physics and mathematics.”
He adds that Ibn al-Haytham in his Optics “aims at elucidating the nature of visual perception through studies on the anatomy and physiology of the eyes, the optic nerves and the frontal part of the brain, along with cognitive psychology and the analysis of psychosomatic ocular motor kinaesthetic acts”
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper, Note: This is one of the more unusual citation I have hrere,
The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, Books IV–V: On Reflection and Image by N. El-Bizri. Seen by Reflection, translated from the Arabic by Abdelhamid I. Sabra and prepared for publication by Jan P. Hogendijk (Warburg Institute Studies and Texts, 8), London: University of London Press in association with the Warburg Institute, 2023, pp. xiv+343, ISBN 978-1908590589, £90. Int class trad 31, 116–119 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-024-00654-4 Published: 20 February 2024 Issue Date: March 2024
The Warburg Institute is one of the world’s leading centres for the study of art and culture. Its collections, courses and programmes are dedicated to the study of global cultural history and the role of images in society. Founded in Hamburg at the turn of the twentieth century by historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the Institute was established to trace the roots of the Renaissance in ancient civilisations and ended up changing the way we see the world around us.
The Warburg Institute owes its mission—and its very existence—to the open movement of people, collections and ideas. Sent into exile when the Nazis came to power, the Institute was transferred to England in 1933 and became part of the University of London in 1944. It has served, during a turbulent century, as a creative crucible for scholars, curators, artists and all those whose work sits outside traditional academic structures.
The Warburg’s unique Library, Archive and Photographic Collection form a holistic, associative engine for exploring the histories of the arts and sciences—linking the textual and the visual, the intellectual and the social, the scientific and the magical. Following an extensive renovation of the Institute’s building in Bloomsbury, new spaces for exhibitions and events have restored the Institute’s original emphasis on discovery, display and debate and are bringing its holdings and programmes to new audiences.
Building on Aby Warburg’s belief that the memory of the past activates the present, the Warburg examines the movement of culture across barriers – of time, space and discipline -to inspire, inform and connect.
Onto breakdancing (or breaking), which for the first time will be an official event at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. Amy Pope, principal lecturer, physics and astronomy, Clemson University (South Carolina, US), has written a June 12, 2024 essay for The Conversation that describes breakdancing as physics in action, (h/t June 13, 2024 news item in phys.org), Note: Links have been removed,
Two athletes square off for an intense dance battle. The DJ starts spinning tunes, and the athletes begin twisting, spinning and seemingly defying gravity, respectfully watching each other and taking turns showing off their skill.
The athletes converse through their movements, speaking through a dance that celebrates both athleticism and creativity. While the athletes probably aren’t consciously thinking about the physics behind their movements, these complex and mesmerizing dances demonstrate a variety of different scientific principles.
Breaking, also known as breakdancing, originated in the late 1970s in the New York City borough of the Bronx. Debuting as an Olympic sport in the 2024 Summer Olympics, breaking will showcase its dynamic moves on a global stage. This urban dance style combines hip-hop culture, acrobatic moves and expressive footwork.
Since its inception, breaking has evolved into a competitive art form. An MC narrates the movements, while a DJ mixes songs to create a dynamic atmosphere. The Olympics will feature two events: one for men, called B-boys, and one for women, called B-girls. In these events, athletes will face off in dance battles.
… Success in this sport requires combining dance moves from three basic categories: top rock, down rock and freeze.
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And now for the physics of it all, from Pope’s June 12, 2024 essay, Note: Links have been removed,
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Top rock moves [emphasis mine] are performed while standing up, focusing on fancy footwork and hand movements. These movements are reminiscent of hip-hop dancing.
Top rock moves rely on having lots of friction between an athlete’s shoes and the floor. Friction is the force [emphasis miine] that resists when you slide something across a surface.
This friction allows the athlete to take very quick steps and to stop abruptly. The dancers must intuitively understand inertia, or the fact that their bodies will continue in the direction they’re moving unless they are acted upon by an external force. To stop abruptly, athletes need to engage their muscles, getting their shoes to grip the ground to stop themselves from continuing forward.
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Down rock moves [emphasis mine] are performed while on the floor. Athletes may spin in circles with their head, back, elbows or shoulders touching the ground and their feet in the air. B-boys and B-girls rely heavily on an internal knowledge of physics to complete these moves.
Consider the physics of a backspin. A backspin occurs when the athlete is on their back with their feet lifted in the air, rotating around a specific area of their back.
Sitting on the floor, the athlete’s left foot stays in contact with the floor while they spread their right leg wide, gathering linear momentum [emphasis mine] as they sweep their right leg toward their left foot in a wide arc. Then, they release their left leg from contact with the ground and roll onto their back.
Now that only their back is in contact with the ground, the linear momentum from their leg turns into angular momentum [emphasis mine], which rotates the athlete around an axis that extends upward from their back’s contact point with the ground. This move turns magical when they bring their legs and arms inward, toward the axis of rotation. This principal is called conservation of angular momentum.
When an athlete brings their mass in more closely to the axis of rotation, the athlete’s rotations speed up. Extending their legs and arms once again and moving their mass away from the axis of rotation will cause the competitor to slow their rotation speed down. Once they slow down, they can transition to another move.
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Freeze [emphasis mine] occurs when athletes come to a stop in a funky pose, often occurring in time to the music and in an upside-down position. To freeze effectively, the athlete must have full control over their center of mass, placing it right above the point of their body that is in contact with the floor. The center of mass is the average position of all the parts of an athlete, weighted according to their masses. The “balance point” where the entire mass of the athlete seems to be concentrated is the center of mass.
Athletes are most stable when their center of mass is as close to the ground as possible. You will see many competitors freeze with arms bent in an effort to lower their center of mass. This lowered center of mass reduces their distance from the floor and minimizes the tendency of their body to rock to one side or the other due to torque.
Torque is a twisting force [emphasis mine], like the force used to turn a wrench. The torque depends on two things: the amount of force you apply, and how far from the pivot point you apply the force. With an athlete’s center of mass closer to the ground, the athlete decreases the distance between the pivot point – the ground – and where the force of gravity is applied – the athlete’s center of mass.
Athletes need great strength to halt their motion mid-movement because they have to apply a force to resist the change in inertia.
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It’s not just about the moves, clothing is a factor, Pope’s June 12, 2024 essay,
Many sports require a specific uniform. Breaking doesn’t – an athlete can wear whatever they want – but the right outfit will maximize their chance of success.
The athlete wants a shirt that minimizes the friction between their body and the ground during a spin. Lettering or images on the back of the shirt will add friction, which hinders an athlete’s ability to perform some down rock moves. An athlete may choose to wear long sleeves if they plan to slide on their elbows, as bare skin in contact with the floor provides more friction.
Athletes also have to think about the headgear they wear. …
There’s a bit more information about the breakdancing competition on the 2024 Olympics website.I cannot find a full list of athletes for the August 9, 2024 (B-Girls) and August 10, 2024 (B-Boys) competitions. There is this June 2, 2024 article (from the Associated Press) on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) online news website,
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Victor Montalvo (B-boy Victor), United States: A breaker who describes himself as a student of old school b-boys from the founding era of hip-hop, the 30-year-old Montalvo, who is from Kissimmee, Florida, qualified for Paris by besting all other b-boys at the 2023 WDSF World Breaking Championship in Belgium.
Sunny Choi (B-girl Sunny), United States: The 35-year-old Choi, a cheerful Queens, New York-bred breaker, has long been an ambassador for b-girls globally. She qualified for the Paris Games with her win at the 2023 Pan American Games in Chile.
Philip Kim (B-boy Phil Wizard), Vancouver, Canada: Consistently ranked in the top three b-boys in the international breaking competitive community, Kim secured a spot for Paris when he came out on top at last year’s Pan American Games.
Dominika Banevič (B-girl Nicka), Lithuania: Banevič was the youngest in her category at last year’s WDSF World Breaking Championship, when she punched her ticket to Paris. Banevič turns 17 this month.
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I thought the competition would be dominated by Americans and certainly wasn’t expecting to see a Lithuanian (Dominika Banevič or ‘Nicka’) listed as a competitor to watch. The Canadian (Philip Kim or ‘Phil Wizard’) is also a surprise. Who knew Vancouver was home to a leading B-boy?
Two comments: heat and mosquitoes (dengue and other fevers)
The organizers of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics are to be complimented for their work towards making the games ‘green’ but that is a complex process.
Heat
For example, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) ran a news item on The National news telecast on June 17, 2024 (see telecast for embedded video clip) regarding concerns about and preparations for heat,
Preparing for extreme heat at the Paris Olympics
Paris Olympic organizers plan to make this summer’s games the greenest ever, but that includes offering less air conditioning to cut down on energy use. [emphases mine] As temperatures rise globally, some suggest the organizers should take extreme heat into account when awarding cities with the next big Olympic games.
Leading athletes are warning that intense heat at the Paris Olympics in July-August 2024 could lead to competitors collapsing and in worst case scenarios dying during the Games. [emphasis mine]
Eleven Olympians, including winners of five World Championships and six Olympic medals, have come together with climate scientists and leading heat physiologists Professor Mike Tipton and Dr Jo Corbett from the University of Portsmouth to unpack the serious threat extreme heat poses for athletes in a new Rings of Fire report.
Dr Corbett, Associate Professor of Environmental Physiology in the School of Sport, Health and Exercise Science at the University of Portsmouth, said: “A warming planet will present an additional challenge to athletes, which can adversely impact on their performance and diminish the sporting spectacle of the Olympic Games,. Hotter conditions also increase the potential for heat illness amongst all individuals exposed to high thermal stress, including officials and spectators, as well as athletes.”
“For athletes, from smaller performance-impacting issues like sleep disruption and last-minute changes to event timings, to exacerbated health impacts and heat related stress and injury, the consequences can be varied and wide-ranging. With global temperatures continuing to rise, climate change should increasingly be viewed as an existential threat to sport,” said Lord Sebastian Coe, President of World Athletics and four-time Olympic medallist.
The Tokyo Games became known as the “hottest in history,” with temperatures exceeding 34°C and humidity reaching nearly 70 per cent, leading to severe health risks for competitors. The Paris Games have the potential to surpass that, with climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels contributing to record heat streaks during the past months.
2023 was the hottest year on record according to the EU’s [European Union] Copernicus Climate Change Service and 2024 has continued this streak. April 2024 was warmer globally than any previous April in the record books, said experts at Copernicus.
The Rings of Fire report discusses the deadly heatwave in France in 2003 – which killed over 14,000 people – and subsequent years of record-breaking temperatures, exceeding 42°C. It underscores the heightened risk of extreme heat during the Paris Olympics, especially considering the significant rise in the region’s temperatures since the city last hosted the Games a century ago.
Olympics: how many days does it take for mosquitoes in Greater Paris to transmit arboviruses, and what preventive measures are needed?
The number of imported cases of dengue in the Greater Paris region increased significantly in the first few months of 2024. In the run-up to the Olympic Games, with huge numbers of international visitors set to come to Paris – especially from endemic dengue countries –, we need to be vigilant. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur, in collaboration with the Regional Mosquito Control Agency (ARD) and the National Reference Center for Arboviruses (Inserm-Irba), have demonstrated that the tiger mosquito, now present in Greater Paris, is capable of transmitting five viruses (West Nile, chikungunya, Usutu, Zika and dengue) within different time frames ranging from 3 to 21 days, at an external temperature of 28°C. These results highlight the importance of stepping up surveillance of imported cases of arboviruses this summer. The study was published on May 16 [2024] in Eurosurveillance.
Between January 1 and April 19, 2024, 1,679 imported dengue cases were reported in mainland France, 13 times more than the number reported over the same period the previous year (source SPF). It is likely that this number will increase during the Olympic Games, as more people come to Paris from countries that are endemic regions for other arboviruses. The vector for dengue transmission is Aedes albopictus, more commonly known as the tiger mosquito. Arboviruses are transmitted when a female mosquito bites a virus carrier and ingests viral particles. One particular feature of arboviruses is that they can replicate in mosquitoes (unlike other viruses such as influenza, which are destroyed when ingested by mosquitoes). The viral particles multiply and spread within the mosquito, reaching the salivary glands in a few days. When the female mosquito bites another human, she injects the virus while taking her blood meal.
The tiger mosquito is now present in 78 départements in mainland France, and this together with other climate change-related factors is facilitating vector-borne transmission. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur’s Arboviruses and Insect Vectors Unit, in collaboration with the Regional Vector Control Agency (ARD) and the National Reference Center for Arboviruses (Inserm-Irba), therefore decided to analyze the ability of Aedes albopictus in Greater Paris to transmit five arboviruses at a temperature of 28°C, which is likely in the region at this time of year, and counted the number of days between initial infection and the possibility of the virus being transmitted through a further mosquito bite. As well as the dengue, chikungunya and Zika viruses, which we already know can be transmitted by the tiger mosquito, the scientists studied the Usutu and West Nile viruses, which are naturally transmitted by another mosquito species, Culex pipiens (known as the “common mosquito”). Culex pipiens mosquitoes transmit viruses to humans after feeding on birds, which act as viral reservoirs.
Tiger mosquito susceptible to five arboviruses
Working in a BSL3 laboratory, the scientists studied the ability of tiger mosquitoes to transmit these five viruses and determined the extrinsic incubation period required for the virus to reach the mosquito’s salivary glands in sufficient quantities to infect a human. At 28°C, West Nile virus needs three days before it can be transmitted to humans by mosquitoes. The incubation period is 3 to 7 days for chikungunya and Usutu, and 14 to 21 days for dengue and Zika.(1)
This information is crucial to gage the additional risk represented by the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris, which will see significant intermingling of populations combined with the return of travelers from endemic regions and a season conducive to mosquito proliferation. The findings can also be used to develop suitable control strategies.
“If a case of dengue is detected in the Greater Paris region, we now know that disinsection is required within 21 days. We can use these results to adjust our time frame for action and optimize our approach,” explains Anna-Bella Failloux, Head of the Institut Pasteur’s Arboviruses and Insect Vectors Unit, who led the study. “Depending on the temperatures we experience in and around Paris this summer, our findings will be essential for adjusting control measures as needed.”
What precautions should be taken in the run-up to the Olympics?
Health care professionals are trained to detect the symptoms of arboviruses if people indicate that they have recently been to an endemic country. The difficulty of surveillance is that many cases are asymptomatic: although dengue is a notifiable disease, up to 80% of cases lead to few or no symptoms. If a diagnosis of one of these diseases is confirmed, an inquiry is carried out by France’s Regional Health Agencies to determine where the individuals live or spent time in the days before the diagnosis, so that they can identify the areas where disinsection is needed. Anyone coming back from a foreign trip who experiences fever or aches is advised to see their family physician immediately and indicate the region they recently returned from.
“The alert system in France is effective. The applicable procedure and measures are already well established because France’s overseas territories in endemic regions have provided us with expertise in these diseases and know-how on epidemiological monitoring. My team is affiliated with the Arbo-France network, and we are contacted as soon as an arbovirus is detected,” continues Anna-Bella Failloux.
Since 2006, vector control measures in France have led to increased surveillance of tiger mosquitoes between May 1 and November 30 each year. This involves monitoring mosquito populations in areas where they are likely to be present; disease surveillance coordinated by Santé publique France based on reporting of viruses such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika by health care professionals; and raising awareness among people living in areas where mosquitoes have been reported. France’s Regional Health Agencies (ARS) and their operators are responsible for managing reporting, monitoring the presence of mosquitoes and taking rapid action in response to human cases of infection (vector control).
This research, which focused on mosquitoes in the Greater Paris region for this first study, will soon be extended to the rest of mainland France. Extrinsic incubation periods vary from one tiger mosquito population to the next because of differences in their genetic makeup and in local temperatures.
It is important to point out that for Usutu and West Nile, the ability of tiger mosquitoes to transmit these viruses to humans in real-life conditions, outside the experimental setting, is yet to be demonstrated, as they are naturally transmitted by Culex pipiens, another mosquito species.
I covered the movement of dengue fever and malaria into the Northern Hemisphere in an August 10, 2023 posting,
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The World Health Organization (WHO) notes that dengue fever cases have increased exponentially since 2000 (from the March 17, 2023 version of the WHO’s “Dengue and severe dengue” fact sheet),
Global burden
The incidence of dengue has grown dramatically around the world in recent decades, with cases reported to WHO increased from 505 430 cases in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2019. A vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or mild and self-managed, and hence the actual numbers of dengue cases are under-reported. Many cases are also misdiagnosed as other febrile illnesses (1).
One modelling estimate indicates 390 million dengue virus infections per year of which 96 million manifest clinically (2). Another study on the prevalence of dengue estimates that 3.9 billion people are at risk of infection with dengue viruses.
The disease is now endemic in more than 100 countries in the WHO Regions of Africa, the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean, South-East Asia and the Western Pacific. The Americas, South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions are the most seriously affected, with Asia representing around 70% of the global disease burden.
Dengue is spreading to new areas including Europe, [emphasis mine] and explosive outbreaks are occurring. Local transmission was reported for the first time in France and Croatia in 2010 [emphasis mine] and imported cases were detected in 3 other European countries.
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The researchers from the University of Central Florida (UCF) couldn’t have known when they began their project to study mosquito bites and disease that Florida would register its first malaria cases in 20 years this summer, …
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It seems pretty clear that there’s increasing concern about mosquito-borne diseases no matter where you live.
It looks like mega-sports events attract more visitors than you might expect.
It seems that physicists are having a moment in the pop culture scene and they are excited about two television series (Fallout and 3 Body Problem) televised earlier this year in US/Canada.
The world ends on Oct. 23, 2077, in a series of radioactive explosions—at least in the world of “Fallout,” a post-apocalyptic video game series that has now been adapted into a blockbuster TV show on Amazon’s Prime Video.
The literal fallout that ensues creates a post-apocalyptic United States that is full of mutated monstrosities, irradiated humans called ghouls and hard scrabble survivors who are caught in the middle of it all. It’s the material of classic Atomic Age sci-fi, the kind of pulp stories “Fallout” draws inspiration from for its retro-futuristic version of America.
But there is more science in this science fiction story than you might think, according to Pran Nath, Matthews distinguished university professor of physics at Northeastern University.
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“Fallout” depicts a post-apocalyptic world centuries after nuclear war ravaged the United States. Amazon MGM Studios Photo
In the opening moments of “Fallout,” which debuted on April 10 [2024], Los Angeles is hit with a series of nuclear bombs. Although it takes place in a clearly fictional version of La La Land –– the robots and glistening, futuristic skyscrapers in the distance are dead giveaways –– the nuclear explosions themselves are shockingly realistic.
Nath says that when a nuclear device is dropped there are three stages.
“When the nuclear blast occurs, because of the chain reaction, in a very short period of time, a lot of energy and radiation is emitted,” Nath says. “In the first instance, a huge flash occurs, which is the nuclear reaction producing gamma rays. If you are exposed to it, people, for example, in Hiroshima were essentially evaporated, leaving shadows.”
Depending on how far someone is from the blast, even those who are partially protected will have their body rapidly heat up to 50 degrees Celsius, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit, causing severe burns. The scalded skin of the ghouls in “Fallout” are not entirely unheard of (although their centuries-long lifespan stretches things a bit).
The second phase is a shockwave and heat blast –– what Nath calls a “fireball.” The shockwave in the first scene of “Fallout” quickly spreads from the blast, but Nath says it would probably happen even faster and less cinematically. It would travel around the speed of sound, around 760 miles per hour.
The shockwave also has a huge amount of pressure, “so huge … that it can collapse concrete buildings.” It’s followed by a “fireball” that would burn every building in the blast area with an intense heatwave.
“The blast area is defined as the area where the shockwaves and the fireball are the most intense,” Nath says. “For Hiroshima, that was between 1 and 2 miles. Basically, everything is destroyed in that blast area.”
The third phase of the nuclear blast is the fallout, which lasts for much longer and has even wider ranging impacts than the blast and shockwave. The nuclear blast creates a mushroom cloud, which can reach as high as 10 miles into the atmosphere. Carried by the wind, the cloud spreads radioactivity far outside the blast area.
“In a nuclear blast, up to 100 different radioactive elements are produced,” Nath says. “These radioactive elements have lifetimes which could be a few seconds, and they could be up to millions of years. … It causes pollution and damage to the body and injuries over a longer period, causing cancer and leukemia, things like this.”
A key part of the world of “Fallout” is the Vaults, massive underground bunkers the size of small towns that the luckiest of people get to retreat into when the world ends. The Vaults are several steps above most real-world fallout shelters, but Nath says that kind of protection would be necessary if you wanted to stay safe from the kind of radiation released by nuclear weapons, particularly gamma rays that can penetrate several feet of concrete.
“If you are further away and you keep inside and behind concrete, then you can avoid both the initial flash of the nuclear blast and also could probably withstand the shockwaves and the heatwave that follows, so the survivability becomes larger,” Nath says.
But what about all the radioactive mutants wandering around the post-apocalyptic wasteland?
It might seem like the colossal, monstrous mutant salamanders and giant cockroaches of “Fallout” are a science fiction fabrication. But there is a real-world basis for this, Nath says.
“There are various kinds of abnormalities that occur [with radiation,]” Nath says. “They can also be genetic. Radiation can create mutations, which are similar to spontaneous mutation, in animals and humans. In Chernobyl, for example, they are discovering animals which are mutated.”
In the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the genetics of wild dogs have been radically altered. Scientists hypothesize that thewolves near Chernobyl may have developed to be more resistant to radiation, which could make them “cancer resistant,” or at least less impacted by cancer. And frogs have adapted to have more melanin in their bodies, a form of protection against radiation, turning them black.
“Fallout” takes the horrifying reality of nuclear war and spins a darkly comic sci-fi yarn, but Nath says it’s important to remember how devastating these real-world forces are.
It’s estimated that as many as 146,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 people in Nagasaki were killed by the effects of the bombs dropped by the U.S. Today’s nuclear weapons are so much more powerful that there is very little understanding of the impact these weapons could have. Nath says the fallout could even exacerbate global warming.
“Thermonuclear war would be a global problem,” Nath says.
Although “Fallout” is a piece of science fiction, the reality of its world-ending scenario is terrifyingly real, says Pran Nath, Matthews distinguished university professor of physics at Northeastern University. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University
Kudos to the photographer!
3 Body Problem (television series)
This one seems to have a lit a fire in the breasts of physicists everywhere. I have a number of written pieces and a video about this this show, which is based on a book by Liu Cixn. (You can find out more about Cixin and his work in his Wikipedia entry.)
“3 Body Problem,” Netflix’s new big-budget adaptation of Liu Cixin’s book series helmed by the creators behind “Game of Thrones,” puts the science in science fiction.
The series focuses on scientists as they attempt to solve a mystery that spans decades, continents and even galaxies. That means “3 Body Problem” throws some pretty complicated quantum mechanics and astrophysics concepts at the audience as it, sometimes literally, tries to bring these ideas down to earth.
However, at the core of the series is the three-body problem, a question that has stumped scientists for centuries.
What exactly is the three-body problem, and why is it still unsolvable? Jonathan Blazek, an assistant professor of physics at Northeastern University, explains that systems with two objects exerting gravitational force on one another, whether they’re particles or stars and planets, are predictable. Scientists have been able to solve this two-body problem and predict the orbits of objects since the days of Isaac Newton. But as soon as a third body enters the mix, the whole system gets thrown into chaos.
“The three-body problem is the statement that if you have three bodies gravitating toward each other under Newton’s law of gravitation, there is no general closed-form solution for that situation,” Blazek says. “Little differences get amplified and can lead to wildly unpredictable behavior in the future.”
In “3 Body Problem,” like in Cixin’s book, this is a reality for aliens that live in a solar system with three suns. Since all three stars are exerting gravitational forces on each other, they end up throwing the solar system into chaos as they fling each other back and forth. For the Trisolarans, the name for these aliens, it means that when a sun is jettisoned far away, their planet freezes, and when a sun is thrown extremely close to their planet, it gets torched. Worse, because of the three-body problem, these movements are completely unpredictable.
For centuries, scientists have pondered the question of how to determine a stable starting point for three gravitational bodies that would result in predictable orbits. There is still no generalizable solution that can be taken out of theory and modeled in reality, although recently scientists have started to find some potentially creative solutions, including with models based on the movements of drunk people.
“If you want to [predict] what the solar system’s going to do, we can put all the planets and as many asteroids as we know into a computer code and basically say we’re going to calculate the force between everything and move everything forward a little bit,” Blazek says. “This works, but to the extent that you’re making some approximations … all of these things will eventually break down and your prediction is going to become inaccurate.”
Blazek says the three-body problem has captivated scientific minds because it’s a seemingly simple problem. Most high school physics students learn Newton’s law of gravity and can reasonably calculate and predict the movement of two bodies.
Three-body systems, and more than three-body systems, also show up throughout the universe, so the question is incredibly relevant. Look no further than our solar system.
The relationship between the sun, Earth and our moon is a three-body system. But Blazek says since the sun exerts a stronger gravitational force on Earth and Earth does the same on the moon, it creates a pair of two-body systems with stable, predictable orbits –– for now.
Blazek says that although our solar system appears stable, there’s no guarantee that it will stay that way in the far future because there are still multi-body systems at play. Small changes like an asteroid hitting one of Jupiter’s moons and altering its orbit ever so slightly could eventually spiral into larger changes.
That doesn’t mean humanity will face a crisis like the one the Trisolarans face in “3 Body Problem.” These changes happen extremely slowly, but Blazek says it’s another reminder of why these concepts are interesting and important to think about in both science and science fiction.
“I don’t think anything is going to happen on the time scale of our week or even probably our species –– we have bigger problems than the instability of orbits in our solar system,” Blazek says. “But, that said, if you think about billions of years, during that period we don’t know that the orbits will stay as they currently are. There’s a good chance there will be some instability that changes how things look in the solar system.”
An April 12, 2024 news item on phys.org covers some of the same ground, Note: A link has been removed.
The science fiction television series 3 Body Problem, the latest from the creators of HBO’s Game of Thrones, has become the most watched show on Netflix since its debut last month. Based on the bestselling book trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Chinese computer engineer and author Cixin Liu, 3 Body Problem introduces viewers to advanced concepts in physics in service to a suspenseful story involving investigative police work, international intrigue, and the looming threat of an extraterrestrial invasion.
Yet how closely does the story of 3 Body Problem adhere to the science that it’s based on? The very name of the show comes from the three-body problem, a mathematical problem in physics long considered to be unsolvable.
Virginia Tech physicist Djordje Minic says, “The three-body problem is a very famous problem in classical and celestial mechanics, which goes back to Isaac Newton. It involves three celestial bodies interacting via the gravitational force—that is, Newton’s law of gravity. Unlike mathematical predictions of the motions of two-body systems, such as Earth-moon or Earth-sun, the three-body problem does not have an analytic solution.”
“At the end of the 19th century, the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré’s work on the three-body problem gave birth to what is known as chaos theory and the concept of the ‘butterfly effect.'”
Both the novels and the Netflix show contain a visualization of the three-body problem in action: a solar system made up of three suns in erratic orbit around one another. Virginia Tech aerospace engineer and mathematics expert Shane Ross discussed liberties the story takes with the science that informs it.
“There are no known configurations of three massive stars that could maintain an erratic orbit,” Ross said. “There was a big breakthrough about 20 years ago when a figure eight solution of the three-body problem was discovered, in which three equal-sized stars chase each other around on a figure eight-shaped course. In fact, Cixin Liu makes reference to this in his books. Building on that development, other mathematicians found other solutions, but in each case the movement is not chaotic.”
Ross elaborated, “It’s even more unlikely that a fourth body, a planet, would be in orbit around this system of three stars, however erratically — it would either collide with one or be ejected from the system. The situation in the book would therefore be a solution of the ‘four-body problem,’ which I guess didn’t have quite the right ring to use as a title.
“Furthermore, a stable climate is unlikely even on an Earth-like planet. At last count, there are at least a hundred independent factors that are required to create an Earth-like planet that supports life as we know it,” Ross said. “We have been fortunate to have had about 10,000 years of the most stable climate in Earth’s history, which makes us think climate stability is the norm, when in fact, it’s the exception. It’s likely no coincidence that this has corresponded with the rise of advanced human civilization.”
About Ross A professor of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech, Shane Ross directs the Ross Dynamics Lab, which specializes in mathematical modeling, simulation, visualization, and experiments involving oceanic and atmospheric patterns, aerodynamic gliding, orbital mechanics, and many other disciplines. He has made fundamental contributions toward finding chaotic solutions to the three-body problem. Read his bio …
About Minic Djordje Minic teaches physics at Virginia Tech. A specialist in string theory and quantum gravity, he has collaborated on award-winning research related to dark matter and dark energy. His most recent investigation involves the possibility that in the context of quantum gravity the geometry of quantum theory might be dynamical in analogy with the dynamical nature of spacetime geometry in Einstein’s theory of gravity. View his full bio …
For the last ‘3 Body Problem’ essay, there’s this April 5, 2023 article by Tara Bitran and Phillipe Thao for Netflix.com featuring comments from a physicist concerning a number of science questions,, Note: Links have been removed,
If you’ve raced through 3 Body Problem, the new series from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and True Blood writer Alexander Woo, chances are you want to know more about everything from Sophons and nanofibers to what actually constitutes a three-body problem. After all, even the show’s scientists are stumped when they witness their well-known theories unravel at the seams.
But for physicists like 3 Body Problem’s Jin (Jess Hong) and real-life astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst (who researches how supermassive black holes grow at the University of Oxford and explains how scientific phenomena work in viral videos), answering the universe’s questions is a problem they’re delighted to solve. In fact, it’s part of the fun. “I feel like scientists look at the term ‘problem’ more excitedly than anybody else does,” Smethurst tells Tudum. “Every scientist’s dream is to be told that they got it wrong before and here’s some new data that you can now work on that shows you something different where you can learn something new.”
The eight-episode series, based on writer Cixin Liu’s internationally celebrated Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, repeatedly defies human science standards and forces the characters to head back to the drawing board to figure out how to face humanity’s greatest threat. Taking us on a mind-boggling journey that spans continents and timelines, the story begins in ’60s China, when a young woman makes a fateful decision that reverberates across space and time into the present day. With humanity’s future in danger, a group of tight-knit scientists, dubbed the Oxford Five, must work against time to save the world from catastrophic consequences.
Dr. Matt Kenzie, associate professor of physics at University of Cambridge and 3 Body Problem’s science advisor, sits down with Tudum to dive into the science behind the series. So if you can’t stop thinking about stars blinking and chaotic eras, keep reading for all the answers to your burning scientific questions. Education time!
What is a Cherenkov tank?
In Episode 1, the Oxford Five’s former college professor, Dr. Vera Ye (Vedette Lim), walks out onto a platform at the top of a large tank and plunges to her death in a shallow pool of water below. If you were wondering what that huge tank was, it’s called a particle detector (sometimes also known as a Cherenkov tank). It’s used to observe, measure, and identify particles, including, in this case, neutrinos, a common particle that comes largely from the sun. “Part of the reason that they’re kind of interesting is that we don’t really understand much about them, and we suspect that they could be giving us clues to other types of physics in the universe that we don’t yet understand,” Dr. Kenzie told Netflix.
When a neutrino interacts with the water molecules stored inside the tank, it sets off a series of photomultiplier tubes — the little circles that line the tank Vera jumps into. Because Vera’s experiment is shut down and the water is reduced to a shallow level, the fall ends up killing her.
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What are nanofibers?
In the show, Auggie’s a trailblazer in nanofiber technology. She runs a company that designs self-assembling synthetic polymer nanofibers and hopes to use her latest innovation to solve world problems, like poverty and disease. But what are nanofibers and how do they work? Dr. Kenzie describes nanofiber technology as “any material with a width of nanometers” — in other words, one millionth of a millimeter in thickness. Nanofibers can be constructed out of graphene (a one-atom thick layer of carbon) and are often very strong. “They can be very flexible,” he adds. “They tend to be very good conductors of both heat and electricity.”
Is nanofiber technology real, and can it actually cut through human flesh?
Nanofiber technology does exist, although Dr. Kenzie says it’s curated and grown in labs under very specific conditions. “One of the difficulties is how you hold them in place — the scaffolding it’s called,” he adds. “You have to design molecules which hold these things whilst you’re trying to build them.”
After being tested on a synthetic diamond cube in Episode 2, we see the real horrors of nanofiber technology when it’s used to slice through human bodies in Episode 5. Although the nanofiber technology that exists today is not as mass produced as Auggie’s — due to the cost of producing and containing it — Dr. Kenzie says it’s still strong enough to slice through almost anything.
What can nanofiber technology be used for?
According to Dr. Kenzie, the nanofiber technology being developed today can be used in several ways within the manufacturing and construction industries. “If you wanted a machine that could do some precision cutting, then maybe [nanofiber] would be good,” he says. “I know they’re also tested in the safety of the munitions world. If you need to bulletproof a room or bulletproof a vest, they’re incredibly light and they’re incredibly strong.” He also adds that nanofiber technology is viewed as a material of the future, which can be used for water filtration — just as we see Auggie use it in the season finale.
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The Bitran and Thao piece includes another description of the 3 Body Problem but it’s the first I’ve seen that describes some of the other science.
Also mentioned in one of the excerpts in this posting is The Science and Entertainment Exchange (also known as The Science & Entertainment Exchange or Science & Entertainment Exchange) according to its Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
The Science & Entertainment Exchange[1] is a program run and developed by the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to increase public awareness, knowledge, and understanding of science and advanced science technology through its representation in television, film, and other media. It serves as a pro-science movement with the main goal of re-cultivating how science and scientists truly are in order to rid the public of false perceptions on these topics. The Exchange provides entertainment industry professionals with access to credible and knowledgeable scientists and engineers who help to encourage and create effective representations of science and scientists in the media, whether it be on television, in films, plays, etc. The Exchange also helps the science community understand the needs and requirements of the entertainment industry, while making sure science is conveyed in a correct and positive manner to the target audience.
Officially launched in November 2008, the Exchange can be thought of as a partnership between NAS and Hollywood, as it arranges direct consultations between scientists and entertainment professionals who develop science-themed content. This collaboration allows for industry professionals to accurately portray the science that they wish to capture and include in their media production. It also provides scientists and science organizations with the opportunity to communicate effectively with a large audience that may otherwise be hard to reach such as through innovative physics outreach. It also provides a variety of other services, including scheduling briefings, brainstorming sessions, screenings, and salons. The Exchange is based in Los Angeles, California.
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I hadn’t realized the exchange was physics specific. Given the success with physics, I’d expect the biology and chemistry communities would be eager to participate or start their own exchanges.
Back in 2019 Canada was having a problem with Malaysia and the Phillipines over the garbage (this is meant literally) that we were shipping over to those counties, which is why an article about Chinese science fiction writer, Chen Qiufan and his 2013 novel, The Waste Tide, caught my attention and I pubisihed this May 31, 2019 posting, “Chen Qiufan, garbage, and Chinese science fiction stories.” There’s a very brief mention of Liu Cxin in one of the excerpts.
I believe this is an April (?) 2024 newsletter and it’s definitely from Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI). Received via email, I was able to find this online copy (Note: I’m not sure how long this copy will remain online) and am excerpting a few items for inclusion here,
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The current state of theoretical physics
Join the latest episode of Conversations at Perimeter as Neil Turok [director of the Perimeter Institute, 2008 – 2019] delves into the intriguing topic of the simplicity of nature.
Free tickets to attend the event in person will be available on Monday, April 22, at 9:00 AM EDT. Live-stream will also be available on the PI YouTube channel.
Hydrogen to Higgs Boson: Particle Physics at the Large Hadron Collider
Explore particle physics with Dr. Clara Nellist at the Perimeter Institute on May 8, as she discusses CERN’s groundbreaking research.
Date and time
Starts on Wednesday, May 8 [2024] · 6pm EDT
Location
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics 31 Caroline Street North Waterloo, ON N2L 2Y5 …
Agenda
6:00 p.m.
Doors Open
Perimeter’s main floor will be open for ticket holders, with scientists available to answer science questions until the show begins.
7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Public Lecture
The public lecture will begin at 7:00pm, including a live stream for virtual attendees. This will include a full presentation as well as a Q&A session.
8:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Post-Event Discussion
Following the lecture, discussion will continue in the atrium, where you can ask questions to the presenter as well as other researchers in the crowd.
About this event
About the Speaker:
Dr Clara Nellist – Particle Physicist and Science Communicator, is currently working at CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] on the ATLAS experiment, with research focusing on top quarks and searching for dark matter with machine learning. Learn more about her work on her Instagram here.
About the Event:
Registration to attend the event in person will be available on Monday, April 22 at 9:00 AM EDT.
Tickets for this event are 100% free. [emphasis mine] As always, our public lectures are live-streamed in real-time on our YouTube channel – available here: https://www.youtube.com/@PIOutreach
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The existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed (or as close to confirmed as scientists will get) in 2012 (see my July 4, 2012 posting “Tears of joy as physicists announce they’re pretty sure they found the Higgs Boson” for an account of the event. Peter Higgs and and François Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
If you are planning to attend the lecture in person, free tickets will be made available on Monday, April 22, at 9:00 AM EDT. Go here and, remember, these tickets go quickly.
A March 4, 2024 news item on phys.org announces research into the physics of using paints and inks in visual art, Note: A link has been removed,
Falling from the tip of a brush suspended in mid-air, an ink droplet touches a painted surface and blossoms into a masterpiece of ever-changing beauty. It weaves a tapestry of intricate, evolving patterns. Some of them resemble branching snowflakes, thunderbolts or neurons, whispering the unique expression of the artist’s vision.
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) researchers set out to analyze the physical principles of this fascinating technique, known as dendritic painting. They took inspiration from the artwork of Japanese media artist, Akiko Nakayama. The work is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.
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Caption: Japanese artist Akiko Nakayama manipulates alcohol and inks to create tree-like dendritic patterns during a live painting session. Credit: Photo Credit: Akiko Nakayama
During her [Akiko Nakayama] live painting performances, she applies colourful droplets of acrylic ink mixed with alcohol atop a flat surface coated with a layer of acrylic paint. Beautiful fractals – tree-like geometrical shapes that repeat at different scales and are often found in nature – appear before the eyes of the audience. This is a captivating art form driven by creativity, but also by the physics of fluid dynamics.
“I have a deep admiration for scientists, such as Ukichiro Nakaya and Torahiko Terada, who made remarkable contributions to both science and art. I was very happy to be contacted by OIST physicist Chan San To. I am envious of his ability ‘to dialogue’ with the dendritic patterns, observing how they change shape in response to different approaches. Hearing this secret conversation was delightful,” explains Nakayama.
“Painters have often employed fluid mechanics to craft unique compositions. We have seen it with David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jackson Pollock, and Naoko Tosa, just to name a few. In our laboratory, we reproduce and study artistic techniques, to understand how the characteristics of the fluids influence the final outcome,” says OIST Professor Eliot Fried of OIST’s Mechanics and Materials Unit, who likes looking at dendritic paintings from artistic and scientific angles.
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In dendritic painting, the droplets made of ink and alcohol experience various forces. One of them is surface tension – the force that makes rain droplets spherical in shape, and allows leaves to float on the surface of a pond. In particular, as alcohol evaporates faster than water, it alters the surface tension of the droplet. Fluid molecules tend to be pulled towards the droplet rim, which has higher surface tension compared to its centre. This is called the Marangoni effect and is the same phenomenon responsible for the formation of wine tears – the droplets or streaks of wine that form on the inside of a wine glass after swirling or tilting.
Secondly, the underlying paint layer also plays an important part in this artistic technique. Dr. Chan tested various types of liquids. For fractals to emerge, the liquid must be a fluid that decreases in viscosity under shear strain, meaning it has to behave somewhat like ketchup. It’s common knowledge that it’s hard to get ketchup out of the bottle unless you shake it. This happens because ketchup’s viscosity changes depending on shear strain. When you shake the bottle, the ketchup becomes less viscous, making it easier to pour it onto your dish. How is this applied to dendritic painting?
“In dendritic painting, the expanding ink droplet shears the underlying acrylic paint layer. It is not as strong as the shaking of a ketchup bottle, but it is still a form of shear strain. As with ketchup, the more stress there is, the easier it is for the ink droplets to flow,” explains Dr. Chan.
“We also showed that the physics behind this dendritic painting technique is similar to how liquid travels in a porous medium, such as soil. If you were to look at the mix of acrylic paint under the microscope, you would see a network of microscopic structures made of polymer molecules and pigments. The ink droplet tends to find its way through this underlying network, travelling through paths of least resistance, that leads to the dendritic pattern,” adds Prof. Fried.
Each dendritic print is one-of-a-kind, but there are at least two key aspects that artists can take into consideration to control the outcome of dendritic painting. The first and most important factor is the thickness of the paint layer spread on the surface. Dr. Chan observed that well-refined fractals appear with paint layer thinner than a half millimetre.
The second factor to experiment with is the concentration of diluting medium and paint in this paint layer. Dr. Chan obtained the most detailed fractals using three parts diluting medium and one part paint, or two parts diluting medium and one part paint. If the concentration of paint is higher, the droplet cannot spread well. Conversely, if the concentration of paint is lower, fuzzy edges will form.
This is not the first science-meets-art project that members of the Mechanics and Materials Unit have embarked on. For example, they designed and installed a mobile sculpture on the OIST campus. The sculpture exemplifies a family of mechanical devices, called Möbius kaleidocycles, invented in the Unit, which may offer guidelines for designing chemical compounds with novel electronic properties.
Currently, Dr. Chan is also developing novel methods of analysing how the complexity of a sketch or painting evolves during its creation. He and Prof. Fried are optimistic that these methods might be applied to uncover hidden structures in experimentally captured or numerically generated images of flowing fluids.
“Why should we confine science to just technological progress?” wonders Dr. Chan. “I like exploring its potential to drive artistic innovation as well. I do digital art, but I really admire traditional artists. I sincerely invite them to experiment with various materials and reach out to us if they’re interested in collaborating and exploring the physics hidden within their artwork.”
Instructions to create dendritic painting at home
Everybody can have fun creating dendritic paintings. The materials needed include a non-absorbent surface (glass, synthetic paper, ceramics, etc.), a brush, a hairbrush, rubbing alcohol (iso-propyl alcohol), acrylic ink, acrylic paint and pouring medium.
Dilute one part of acrylic paint to two or three parts of pouring medium, or test other ratios to see how the result changes
Apply this to the non-absorbent surface uniformly using a hairbrush. OIST physicists have found out that the thickness of the paint affects the result. For the best fractals, a layer of paint thinner than half millimetre is recommended.
Mix rubbing alcohol with acrylic ink. The density of the ink may differ for different brands: have a try mixing alcohol and ink in different ratios
When the white paint is still wet (hasn’t dried yet), apply a droplet of the ink with alcohol mix using a brush or another tool, such as a bamboo stick or a toothpick.
Enjoy your masterpiece as it develops before your eyes.
This lecture won’t take place until February 28, 2024 and these tickets are for the in person event, that said, here’s more from the February 9, 2024 notice (received via email),
Why We have not discovered Dark Matter: A Theorist’s apology WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 28 [2024] at 7:00 pm ET FLIP TANEDO
Astronomical evidence suggests the galaxy is filled with dark matter, which we know little about and expect to be distinct from ordinary matter. Despite 30 years of research, we haven’t found a connection between dark matter and fundamental physics. Dark matter is incredibly elusive despite heroic experimental efforts.
On February 28 [2024], University of California Riverside faculty member Flip Tanedo will discuss how we got things so wrong, why we can be optimistic about the future, and what it means to “do physics” on something where the only thing we really know is that it probably exists.
Don’t miss out! Free tickets to attend this event in person will become available on Monday, February 12 [2024], at 9 am ET.
Speaker: Flip Tanedo, University of California Riverside
Biography: Flip Tanedo spends his time thinking about dark matter. He grew up in Los Angeles and fell in love with physics after reading The Physics of Star Trek. This carried into degrees in mathematics and physics at Stanford, Cambridge, Durham, and a Ph.D at Cornell. After a postdoc at UC Irvine, he is currently faculty at UC Riverside where he is often covered in a layer of chalk dust.
Reminder for those of us on the West Coast, subtract three hours from the time listed, i.e., 9 am at the Perimeter Institute is 6 am PT.
Credit: Rice University [downloaded from https://phys.org/news/2023-10-energy-consciousness-physics-thorny-topic.html]
There’s an intriguing approach tying together ideas about consciousness, artificial intelligence, and physics in an October 8, 2023 news item on phys.org,
With the rise of brain-interface technology and artificial intelligence that can imitate brain functions, understanding the nature of consciousness and how it interacts with reality is not just an age-old philosophical question but also a salient challenge for humanity.
Can AI become conscious, and how would we know? Should we incorporate human or animal cells, such as neurons, into machines and robots? Would they be conscious and have subjective experiences? Does consciousness reduce to physicalism, or is it fundamental? And if machine-brain interaction influenced you to commit a crime, or caused a crime, would you be responsible beyond a reasonable doubt? Do we have a free will?
AI and computer science specialist Dr Mahendra Samarawickrama, winner of the Australian Computer Society’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Professional of the year, has applied his knowledge of physics and artificial neural networks to this thorny topic.
He presented a peer-reviewed paper on fundamental physics and consciousness at the 11th International Conference on Mathematical Modelling in Physical Sciences, Unifying Matter, Energy and Consciousness, which has just been published in the AIP (the American Institute of Physics) Conference Proceedings.
“Consciousness is an evolving topic connected to physics, engineering, neuroscience and many other fields. Understanding the interplay between consciousness, energy and matter could bring important insights to our fundamental understanding of reality,” said Dr Samarawickrama.
“Einstein’s dream of a unified theory is a quest that occupies the minds of many theoretical physicists and engineers. Some solutions completely change existing frameworks, which increases complexity and creates more problems than it solves.
“My theory brings the notion of consciousness to fundamental physics such that it complements the current physics models and explains the time, causality, and interplay of consciousness, energy and matter.
“I propose that consciousness is a high-speed sequential flow of awareness subjected to relativity. The quantised energy of consciousness can interplay with matter creating reality while adhering to laws of physics, including quantum physics and relativity.
“Awareness can be seen in life, AI and even physical realities like entangled particles. Studying consciousness helps us be aware of and differentiate realities that exist in nature,” he said.
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Dr Samarawickrama is an honorary Visiting Scholar in the School of Computer Science at the University of Technology Sydney, where he has contributed to UTS research on data science and AI, focusing on social impact.
“Research in this field could pave the way towards the development of conscious AI, with robots that are aware and have the ability to think becoming a reality. We want to ensure that artificial intelligence is ethical and responsible in emerging solutions,” Dr Samarawickrama said.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper Samarawickrama presented at the 11th International Conference on Mathematical Modelling in Physical Sciences, Unifying Matter, Energy and Consciousness,
Unifying matter, energy and consciousness by Mahendra Samarawickrama. AIP Conf. Proc. Volume 2872, Issue 1, 28 September 2023, 110001 (2023) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0162815
This paper is open access.
The researcher has made a video of his presentation and further information available,
It’s a little bit over my head but hopefully repeated viewings and readings will help me better understand Dr. Samarawickrama’s work.
Using dice and buttons for understanding entropy? Apparently, filling the boxes in the image below with everyday objects helps students to better understand entropy and thermodynamics,
Caption: This hands-on model leverages known conditions of a simple system of hard particles to demonstrate how entropy is related to the number of accessible microstates by observing the degrees of freedom available to each particle. Credit: T. Ryan Rogers
Though a cornerstone of thermodynamics, entropy remains one of the most vexing concepts to teach budding physicists in the classroom. As a result, many people oversimplify the concept as the amount of disorder in the universe, neglecting its underlying quantitative nature.
In The Physics Teacher, co-published by AIP [American Institute of Physics] Publishing and the American Association of Physics Teachers, researcher T. Ryan Rogers designed a hand-held model to demonstrate the concept of entropy for students. Using everyday materials, Rogers’ approach allows students to confront the topic with new intuition — one that takes specific aim at the confusion between entropy and disorder.
“It’s a huge conceptual roadblock,” Rogers said. “The good news is that we’ve found that it’s something you can correct relatively easily early on. The bad news is that this misunderstanding gets taught so early on.”
While many classes opt for the imperfect, qualitative shorthand of calling entropy “disorder,” it’s defined mathematically as the number of ways energy can be distributed in a system. Such a definition merely requires students to understand how particles store energy, formally known as “degrees of freedom.”
To tackle the problem, Rogers developed a model in which small objects such as dice and buttons are poured into a box, replicating a simple thermodynamic system. Some particles in the densely filled box are packed in place, meaning they have fewer degrees of freedom, leading to an overall low-entropy system.
As students shake the box, they introduce energy into the system, which loosens up locked-in particles. This increases the overall number of ways energy can be distributed within the box.
“You essentially zoom in on entropy so students can say, ‘Aha! There is where I saw the entropy increase,’” Rogers said.
As students shake further, the particles settle into a configuration that more evenly portions out the energy among them. The catch: at this point of high entropy, the particles fall into an orderly alignment.
“Even though it looks more orientationally ordered, there’s actually higher entropy,” Rogers said.
All the students who participated in the lesson were able to reason to the correct definition of entropy after the experiment.
Next, Rogers plans to extend the reach of the model by starting a conversation about entropy with other educators and creating a broader activity guide for ways to use the kits for kindergarten through college. He hopes his work inspires others to clarify the distinction in their classrooms, even if by DIY means.
“Grapes and Cheez-It crackers are very effective, as well,” Rogers said.
Common materials for handheld entropy demonstration. (a) Small, hard, rectangular, clear box with lid. (b) Octahedral dice serving as hard particles. (c) Sewing buttons serving as hard disks. (d) Wooden dowels cut to equal lengths serving as hard rods. [downloaded from https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/pte/article/61/6/439/2908340/Hands-on-Model-for-Investigating-Entropy-and]
Be careful not to fall, is a familiar stricture when applied to ‘leaning out of windows’ supplying a frisson of danger to the ‘lean’ but in German, ‘aus dem Fenster lehnen’ or ‘lean out of the window’, is an expression for interdisciplinarity. It’s a nice touch for a book about an art/physics collaboration where it can feel ‘dangerous’ to move so far out of your comfort zone. The book is described this way in its Vancouver (Canada) Public Library catalogue entry,
Art and physics collide in this expansive exploration of how knowledge can be translated across disciplinary communities to activate new aesthetic and scientific perspectives.
Leaning Out of Windows shares findings from a six-year collaboration by a group of artists and physicists exploring the connections and differences between the language they use [emphasis mine], the means by which they develop knowledge, how that knowledge is visualized, and, ultimately, how they seek to understand the universe. Physicists from TRIUMF, Canada’s particle physics accelerator, presented key concepts in the physics of Antimatter, Emergence, and In/visible Forces to artists convened by Emily Carr University of Art + Design; the participants then generated conversations, process drawings, diagrams, field notes, and works of art. The “wondrous back-and-forth” of this process allowed both scientists and artists to, as Koenig [Ingrid Koenig] and Cutler [Randy Lee Cutler] describe, “lean out of our respective fields of inquiry and inhabit the infinite spaces of not knowing.”
From this leaning into uncertainty comes a rich array of work towards furthering the shared project of artists and scientists in shaping cultural understandings of the universe: Otoniya J. Okot Bitek reflects on the invisible forces of power; Jess H. Brewer contemplates emergence, free will, and magic; Mimi Gellman looks at the resonances between Indigenous Knowledge and physics; Jeff Derksen finds Hegelian dialectics within the matter-antimatter process; Sanem Güvenç considers the possibilities of the void; Nirmal Raj ponders the universe’s “special moment of light and visibility” we happen to inhabit; Sadira Rodrigues eschews the artificiality of the lab for a “boring berm of dirt”; and Marina Roy metaphorically turns beams of stable and radioactive gold particles into art of pigments, oils, liquid plastic, and wood. Combined with additional essays, diagrams, and artworks, these texts and artworks live in the intersection of disparate fields that nonetheless share a deep curiosity of the world and our place within it, and a dedication to building and sharing knowledges.
Self-published, “Leaning Out of Windows: An Art and Physics Collaboration” and edited by Ingrid Koenig & Randy Lee Cutler (who also wrote many of the essays) was produced through an entity known as Figure 1 (located in Vancouver). It can be purchased for $45 CAD here on the Figure 1 website or $41.71 (CAD?) on Amazon. (Weirdly, if you look at the back outside cover you’ll see a price of $45 USD.)
Kind of a book
“Leaning” functions as three kinds of books in one package. First, it is documentation for a six year project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), second, a collection of essays, and, third, a catalogue for three inter-related exhibitions. (Aside: my focus is primarily on the text for an informal book review.)
Like an art exhibition catalogue, this book is printed in a large, awkward to hold format, with shiny (coated) pages. It makes reading the essays and documentation a little challenging but perfect for a picture book/coffee table book where the images are supposed to look good.
I particularly liked the maps for the various phases of the project and the images for phase 1 showing what happens when an image is passed from one artist to the next, without explanation, asking for a new image to be produced and passed on to yet another artist and so on. There is no discussion amongst the artists about the initial impetus (the first artist in the stream of four met with physicists at a science symposium to talk about antimatter).
Ingrid Koenig, Antimatter Process Design (detail), 2017. This diagram shows the process design of five different streams of interactions, mapping out routes for 26 artists and 26 physicists, as well as an experimental class taught by Koenig at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. [downloaded from https://canadianart.ca/features/searching-for-the-language-of-the-universe/]
Unexpectedly, the documentation proved to be a highlight for me. BTW, you can find out more about the Leaning Out of Windows (LOoW) project (e.g. participants, phases, and art/science resources) on its website.
Koenig should be congratulated for getting as much publicity for the book as possible, given the topic and that there are no celebrities involved. CBC gave it a mention (May 8, 2023) on its Books: Leaning Out of Windows webpage. It also got a mention by Dana Gee in a May 12, 2023 ‘Books brief‘ posting on the Vancouver Sun website.
Plus, there were a couple of articles in an art magazine highlighting the art/science project while it was in progress featuring the few images I was about to access online for this project.
A January 6, 2020 article in Canadian Art Magazine by Randy Lee Cutler and Ingrid Koenig introduces the project (Note: I’ll revisit the “metaphor and analogy” mention in this article and throughout the LOoW book later in this post),
The disciplines of art and physics share certain critical perspectives: both deal with how metaphor and analogy inform creative processes. Additionally, artists and physicists address issues of the imagination, creative thinking and communication, and how meaning is made through theoretical research and process-based investigations. There are also important differences in these perspectives. Art brings an appreciation for abstract or non-representational practices. Physics research addresses complex problems relevant to understanding the study of matter and motion through space and time. Physicists also contribute knowledge about how the universe behaves. Together, the achievements of art and physics allow the possibility of a much richer understanding of the nature of reality than each field can contribute individually.
There’s a January 13, 2020 article in Canadian Art Magazine by Perrin Grauer featuring Mimi Gellman, Note: A link has been removed,
Artwork by artist and ECU Associate Professor Mimi Gellman was selected to appear on the cover of the current issue of Canadian Art magazine.
The gleaming, otherworldly image graces the magazine’s issue on antimatter —a subject which “presents a mirror world of abstract phenomena: time reversals, mutual annihilation, cosmic rays, cloud chambers, an infinite sea of sub-atomic particles that parallels our ‘real’ world of matter,” according to the issue’s editors.
Mimi describes her work as approaching some of the affinities between the biological, the perceptual, the cultural and the astronomical.
“My drawings do not explore the exterior world we perceive but rather what I call the ‘architecture of consciousness’ which permits us to perceive it,” she says.
“Recalling astronomical diagrams and reflecting the mixture of hybrid cultural worldviews in my background, they reveal deep similarities between the dimension explored by sub-atomic physics and the implicit interiority of contemporary art.”
…
I’m sorry I never saw any announcements for the project exhibitions, all of which seemed to have taken place at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. There were three concepts each explored in three exhibitions, with different artists each time, titled: Antimatter, Emergence, and In/visible Forces, respectively.
A bouquet or two and a few nitpicks
Randy Lee Cutler and Ingrid Koenig have a wonderful quote from Karen Barad, physicist and philosopher, in their essay titled, “Collaborative Research between Artists and Physicists,”
Barad introduces the concept of intra-action and the fluidity of materialization through our bodily entanglements—through intra-action our bodies remain entangled with those around us. “Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin, the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future.This is a true for electrons as it is for brittlestars as it is for the differentially constituted human.” As Barad asks herself, “How do I know where my physics begins and ends?” … [p. 13]
To the left of the page is a black and white photograph of entangled cables captioned, “GRIFFIN (Gamma Ray Infrastructure for Fundamental Investigations of Nuclei- TRIUMF.” It’s a nice touch and points to the difficulty of ‘illustrating’ or producing visual art in response to physics ideas such as quantum entanglement, something Einstein called, ‘spooky action at a distance’. From the Quantum entanglement Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon that occurs when a group of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others [[emphasis mine], including when the particles are separated by a large distance [emphasis mine]. The topic of quantum entanglement is at the heart of the disparity between classical and quantum physics: entanglement is a primary feature of quantum mechanics not present in classical mechanics.[1]
Some of the essays
One essay that stood out in LOoW, was “A Boring Berm of Dirt’ (pp. 141-7) by Sadira Rodrigues. She notes that dirt and soil are not the same; one is dead (dirt) and the other is living (soil) and that the berm has an important role at TRIUMF. If you want a more specific discussion of the difference between dirt and soil, see David Beaulieu’s February 23, 2023 essay (Soil vs. Dirt: What’s the Difference?) on The Spruce website.
Rodrigues’ essay (part of the Emergence concept) situates the work physically (word play alert: physics/physically) whereas all of the other work is based on ideas.
In “Boring Berm … ,” radioactivity is mentioned, a term which is largely taboo these days due its association with poisoning, bombs, and death. The eassy goes into fascinating detail about TRIUMF’s underground facility and how the facility deals with its nuclear waste and the role that the berm plays. (On a more fanciful note, the danger in the title of the book is given another dimension in this essay focused on nuclear topics.) Regardless, the essay was definitely an eye-opener.
Aside: The institution has been rebranded from: TRIUMF (Canada’s National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics) to: TRIUMF (Canada’s national particle accelerator centre). You can find a reference to the ‘nuclear’ name in my October 2, 2018 posting although the name was already changed, probably in the early to mid-2010s. There is no mention of the ‘nuclear’ name in TRIUMF’s Wikipedia entry, accessed August 22, 2023.
Gellman and language
Mimi Gellman’s essay, “Crossing No Divide: Mapping Affinities in Art and Science” evokes unity, as can be seen in the title. She’s one of the more ‘lyrical’ writers,
There is a place in our imagination where east or west, or large or small, or any other opposites cease to be productive contradictions. As an artist and educator, I have become interested in the non-binary and resonance between Indigenous Knowledge and physics, between art and science, and between traditional ways of considering cognition and thinking with the hand. [p. 33]
This is how Gellman is described for the January 13, 2020 article in Canadian Art Magazine, which is archived on the Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD) website,
Mimi Gellman is an Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi (Ojibway-Jewish Métis) visual artist and educator with a multi-streamed practice in architectural glass and conceptual installation. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada, and is completing her research praxis PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University on the metaphysics of Indigenous mapping.
…
She highlights some interesting observations about language and thinking,
The Ojibwe language, Anishinaabemowin, like many Indigenous languages is verb-based in contrast with Western languages’ noun-based constructions and these have deep implications for the development of one’s worldview. …
I suspect anyone who speaks more than one language can testify to the observation that language affects one’s worldview. More academically, it’s called linguistic relativity or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I find it hard to believe that it’s considered a controversial idea but here goes from the Linguistic relativity Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
The idea of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis /səˌpɪər ˈhwɔːrf/ sə-PEER WHORF, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers’ worldview or cognition, and thus individuals’ languages determine or shape their perceptions of the world.[1]
The hypothesis has long been controversial, and many different, often contradictory variations have existed throughout its history.[2] The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and restrict cognitive categories. This was held by some of the early linguists before World War II,[3] but it is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.[4] Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity:[4][3] that a language’s structures influence and shape a speaker’s perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.
…
Gettng back to Gellman, language, linguistic relativity, worldviews, and, adding physics/science, she quotes James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood Henderson “a research fellow at the Native Law Centre of Canada, University of Saskatchewan College of Law. He was born to the Bear Clan of the Chickasaw Nation and Cheyenne Tribe in Oklahoma in 1944 and is married to Marie Battiste, a Mi’kmaw educator. In 1974, he received a juris doctorate in law from Harvard Law School,”
[at a 1993 dialogue between Western and Indigenous scientists …]
[Youngblood Henderson] We don’t have one god. You need a noun-based language to have one god. We have forces. All forces are equal and you are just the amplifier of the forces. The way you conduct your life and the dignity you give to other things gives you access to other forces. Even trees are verbs instead of nouns. The Mi’kmaq named their trees for the sound the wind makes when it blows through the trees during the autumn about an hour after the sunset, when the wind usually comes from a certain direction. So one might be like a ‘shu-shu’ something and another more like a ‘tinka-tinka’ something. Although physics in the western world has been essentially the quest for the smallest noun (which used to be a-tom, ‘that which cannot be further divided’), as they were inside the atom things weren’t acting like nouns anymore. The physicists were intrigued with the possibilities inherent in a language that didn’t depend on nouns but could move right to verbs when the circumstances were appropriate.3
…
This work from Gellman is a favourite of mine, and is featured in the January 13, 2020 article in Canadian Art Magazine and you’ll find it in the book,
Image courtesy Mimi Gellman.
Mimi Gellman, ‘Invisible Landscapes,’ 2017. Conte on Japanese Obonai paper, 63.5 x 48.3 cm.
[downloaded from https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2020/canadian-art-magazine-features-cover-artwork-by-mimi-gellman]
There are more LOoW images embedded in the January 6, 2020 article on the Canadian Art Magazine website.
Derksen and his poem
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Theodor W. Adorno, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel were unexpected guest stars in Derksen’s essay, “From Two to Another: The Anti-Matter Series,” given that he is an award-winning poet. These days he has this on his profile page on the Department of English, Simon Fraser University website, “Dean and Associate Provost, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.”
From LOoW,
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are well known as materialists, having helped define a materialist view of history, of economics and of capitalism. And both Marx and Engels aimed to develop Marxism as a science rather than a model based on naturalizing capitalism and “man.” … [p. 89]
Derksen includes a diagram/poem, for which I can’t find a digitized copy, but here’s what he had to say about it,
My mode of looking at this [antimatter] is through poetic research —which itself does not aim to arrive at a synthesis but instead looks for relational moments. In this I also see a poetic language emerge from both discourses [artistic/scientific]—matter-antimatter thought and dialectical thinking. For my contribution to Leaning Out of Windows, I have tried to combine the scientific aspect of dialectical thinking with the poetic aspect of matter-antimatter thought and experimentation. To do this, I have taken the diagrammatic rendering of Carl Anderson’s experiment which resulted in his 1932 paper … as a model to relate the dialectical thinking at the heart of Marxism and matter-antimatter thought. …
Towards the end of his essay, Derksen notes that he’s working (on what I would call) a real poem. I sent an email to Derksen on August 21, 2023 asking,
Have you written the poem or is still in progress?
If you have written it, has it been published or is it being readied for publication? I would be happy to mention where.
If you do have it ready and would like to ‘soft launch’ the poem, could you send it to me for inclusion in the post?
No response at this time.
Flashback to Alan Storey
I think it was 2002 or 2003 when I first heard about an artist at TRIUMF, Alan Storey. The ‘residency’ was the product of a joint effort between the Canada Council for the Arts (Canada Council) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC).
I spoke with Storey towards the end of his ;residency; and he was a little disappointed because nothing much had come of it. Nobody really seemed to know what to do with an artist at a nuclear facility and he didn’t really didn’t seem to know either. (Alan Storey’s work can be seen in the City of Vancouver’s collection of public art works here and on his website.)
My guess is that someone had a great idea but didn’t think past the ‘let’s give money to science institutions so they can host some artists who will magically produce wonderful things for us’ stage of thinking. While there is no longer a Canada Council/NSERC programme, it’s clear from LOoW (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [SSHRC]) that lessons have been learned.
Kudos to David Morissey who acted as an interface and convenor for the artists and to Nigel Smith (Director 2021 – present) and Jonathan Bagger (Director 2014 – 2020) for supporting the project from the TRIUMF side and to Ingrid Koenig and Randy Lee Cutler who organized and facilitated LOoW from the artists’ side.
Now, for the nits
“Co-thought” is mentioned a number of times. What is it? According to my searches, it has something to do with gestures. Here’s one of the few reference I could find for co-thought,
Co-thought and co-speech gestures are generated by the same action generation process by Mingyuan Chu and Sotaro Kita. Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2016 Feb;42(2):257-70. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000168. Epub 2015 Aug 3.
Abstract
People spontaneously gesture when they speak (co-speech gestures) and when they solve problems silently (co-thought gestures) [emphasis mine]. In this study, we first explored the relationship between these 2 types of gestures and found that individuals who produced co-thought gestures more frequently also produced co-speech gestures more frequently (Experiments 1 and 2). This suggests that the 2 types of gestures are generated from the same process. We then investigated whether both types of gestures can be generated from the representational use of the action generation process that also generates purposeful actions that have a direct physical impact on the world, such as manipulating an object or locomotion (the action generation hypothesis). To this end, we examined the effect of object affordances on the production of both types of gestures (Experiments 3 and 4). We found that individuals produced co-thought and co-speech gestures more often when the stimulus objects afforded action (objects with a smooth surface) than when they did not (objects with a spiky surface). These results support the action generation hypothesis for representational gestures. However, our findings are incompatible with the hypothesis that co-speech representational gestures are solely generated from the speech production process (the speech production hypothesis).
It would have been nice if Koenig and Cutler had noted they were borrowing a word ot coining a word and explaining how it was being used in the LOoW context.
Fruit, passports, and fishing trips
The editors/writers use the words or variants, metaphor, poetry, and analogy with great abandon.
“Fruitful bridge” (top of page) and “fruitful match-ups” (bottom of page) on p. 18 seemed a bit excessive as did the “metaphorical passport” on p. 5.
I choked a bit over this on p. 19, “… these artist/scientist interactions can be seen as ‘procedural metaphors’ that enact a thought experiment … .” Procedural metaphor? It seems a bit of a stretch.
A last example and it’s a pair: “metaphorical fishing trips whereby artist and scientists received whatever they might reel in …” on p. 42 (emphases mine). Fishing trips are mentioned in a later essay too, one of the few times there’s some sort of follow through on an analogy.
Maybe someone who wasn’t involved with the project should have taken a look at the text before it was sent to the printer.
Using the words, poetry, metaphor, and analogy can be tricky and, I want to emphasize that in my opinion, those words were not often put to good use in this book.
Moving on, arts and sciences together have a longstanding history.
*ETA October 3, 2023: Ooops! I had a comment about the use of the word ‘passports’ in the book but somewhere in all my edits, I cut it out. (huff)*
Poetry and physics
One of the giants of 19th century physics, James Clerk Maxwell was also known for his poetry. and some of the most evocative (poetic) text in the LOoW book can be found in the quotes from various physicists of the 20th century. The link between physicist and poetry is explicit in a September 17, 2018 posting (12 poignant poems (and one bizarre limerick) written by physicists about physics) by Colin Hunter for the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.
Going back further, there’s De rerum natura, a poem in six books, by Lucretius ((c. 99 BCE– c. 55 BCE). Amongst many other philosophical concerns (e.g., the nature of mind and soul, etc.), Lucretius also discussed atomism (“… a natural philosophy proposing that the physical universe is composed of fundamental indivisible components known as atoms; from the Atomism Wikipedia entry). So, poetry and physics have a long history.
Leaving aside Derksen’s diagram/poem, there’s a dearth of poetry in the book except for a suite of seven poems from TRIUMF physicist and professor at UBC, Jess Brewer following his “Emergence, Free Will and Magic” essay,
Emergence / An extremely brief history of one universe, expressed as a series of science fiction poems by Jess H. Brewer, June 29, 2019
Inspired by Dyson Freeman’s delightful lecture series , “Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” Reviews of Modern Physics (51) 1979
1. Bang Why not? For reasons known only to itself, the universe begins The quantum foam of spacetime seethes with effortless energies, entering and exiting this continuum with a turbulent intensity transcending the superficially smooth expanding cosmos and yet it kens the glacial passage of “time”, because it waits. And kens the vast reaches of “space”, because it watches, Its own experiences has taught it that from each iteration of complexity, awareness will emerge.
… [p. 149]
My thanks to Brewer for the poetry and magic and my apologies for any mistakes I’ve introduced into his piece. I was trying to be especially careful with the punctuation as that can make quite a difference to how a piece is read.
While Muriel Rukeyser is not a physicist at TRIUMF or, indeed, alive, one of her poems leads the essay “Leaning into Language or the Universe is Made of Stories,” by Randy Lee Cutler and Ingrid Koenig,
Time comes into it Say it. Say it. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.. —Muriel Ruykeyser, Speed of Darkness, 1968
Before getting into the response that physicist, David Morrissey, had to the poem, here’s a little about the poet, from the Poetry Foundation’s Muriel Ruykeyser (1913-1980) webpage,
Muriel Rukeyser was a poet, playwright, biographer, children’s book author, and political activist. Indeed, for Rukeyser, these activities and forms of expression were linked. …
…
One of Rukeyser’s intentions behind writing biographies of nonliterary persons was to find a meeting place between science and poetry. [emphasis mine] In an analysis of Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, Virginia Terris argued that Rukeyser believed that in the West, poetry and science are wrongly considered to be in opposition to one another. Thus, writes Terris, “Rukeyser [set] forth her theoretical acceptance of science … [and pointed] out the many parallels between [poetry and science]—unity within themselves, symbolic language, selectivity, the use of the imagination in formulating concepts and in execution. [emphasis mine] Both, she believe[d], ultimately contribute to one another.”
…
Rokeyser’s poem raised a few questions. Is her poem a story? Or, is she using symbolic language, the poem, to poke fun at stories and atoms? Is she suggesting that atoms are really stories? I found the poem evocative especially with where it was placed in the book.
Morrissey takes a prosaic approach, from the essay “Leaning into Language or the Universe is Made of Stories,”
… [in response to Rukeyser’s claim about stories] Morrissey responded stating that “scientific theories are stories—but how we evaluate stories is important—they need to be true, but they do probe, and some are more popular than others, especially theories that we can’t measure.” He surprised us further when he said that wrong stories can also be useful—they may have elements in them that turn out to be useful for future research. … [pp. 205-6]
In general and throughout this project, it seems as if they (artists and physicists) tried but, for the most part, were never quite able to articulate in poetic, metaphoric, and analogical forms. They tended to fall back onto their preferred modes of scientific notations, prosaic language, and artworks.
Both sides of the knife blade cut
Everybody does it. Poets, academics, artists, scientists, etc. we all appropriate ideas and language, sometimes without understanding them very well. Take this for example, from the Canadian Broadcasting’s (CBC) Books “Elementary Particles” August 16, 2023 webpage,
Elementary Particles by Sneha Madhavan-Reese
A poetry collection about family history and scientific exploration
Through keen, quiet observation, Sneha Madhavan-Reese’s evocative new collection takes us from the wide expanse of rural India to the minute map of Michigan we carry on the palms of our hands. These poems contemplate ancestral language, the wonder and uncertainty of scientific discovery, the resilience of a dung beetle, the fleeting existence of frost flowers on the Arctic Ocean.
The collection is full of familiar characters, from Rosa Parks to Seamus Heaney to Corporal Nathan Cirillo, anchoring it in specific moments in time and place, but has the universality that comes from exploring the complex relationship between a child and her immigrant parents, and in turn, a mother and her children. Elementary Particles examines the building blocks of a life — the personal, family, and planetary histories, transformations, and losses we all experience. (From Brick Books)
Sneha Madhavan-Reese is a writer currently based in Ottawa. In 2015 she received Arc Poetry Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize and was shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. Her previous poetry collection is called Observing the Moon
As you can see, there’s no substantive mention of physics in this book description—it’s just a title. Puzzling since there’s this about the author on Asian Heritage Canada’s Sneha Madhavan-Reese webpage
Sneha Madhavan-Reese’s award winning poetry has been widely published in literary magazines in North America and Australia. She earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT in 2000, and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan in 2002. Madhavan-Reese currently lives in Ottawa, Ontario. [emphases mine]
It seems the mechanical engineer did not write up her book blurb because even though the poet’s scientific specialty is not physics as such, I’d expect a better description.
In the end, it seems art and science or poetry and science (in this case, physics) sells.
Alchemy, beauty, and Marx’s surprise connection to atomism
It was unexpected to see a TRIUMF physicist reference alchemy. The physicists haven’t turned lead into gold but they have changed one element into another. If memory holds it was one metallic atom being changed into another type of metallic atom. (Having had to return the book to the library, memory has serve.)
The few references to alchemy that I’ve stumbled across elsewhere in my readings of assorted science topics are derogatory, hence the surprise. Things may be changing; Princeton University Press published a November 7, 2018 posting by author William R. Newman about Newton and alchemy. First, here’s a bit about William Newman,
William R. Newman is Distinguished Professor and Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Indiana University. His many books include Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution and Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
People often say that Isaac Newton was not only a great physicist, but also an alchemist. This seems astonishing, given his huge role in the development of science. Is it true, and if so, what is the evidence for it?
WN: The astonishment that Newton was an alchemist stems mostly from the derisive opinion that many moderns hold of alchemy [emphasis mine]. How could the man who discovered the law of universal gravitation, who co-invented calculus, and who was the first to realize the compound nature of white light also engage in the seeming pseudo-science of alchemy? There are many ways to answer this question, but the first thing is to consider the evidence of Newton’s alchemical undertaking. We now know that at least a million words in Newton’s hand survive in which he addresses alchemical themes. Much of this material has been edited in the last decade, and is available on the Chymistry of Isaac Newton site at www.chymistry.org. Newton wrote synopses of alchemical texts, analyzed their content in the form of reading notes and commentaries, composed florilegia or anthologies made up of snippets from his sources, kept experimental laboratory notebooks that recorded his alchemical research over a period of decades, and even put together a succession of concordances called the Index chemicus in which he compared the sayings of different authors to one another. The extent of his dedication to alchemy was almost unprecedented. Newton was not just an alchemist, he was an alchemist’s alchemist.
…
Beauty
The ‘beauty’ essay by Ingrid Koenig was also a surprise. Beauty seems to be anathema to contemporary artists. I wrote this in an August 23, 2016 posting (Georgina Lohan, Bharti Kher, and Pablo Picasso: the beauty and the beastliness of art [in Vancouver]), “It seems when it comes to contemporary art, beauty is transgressive.”
Koenig describes it as irrelevant for contemporary artists and yet, beauty is an important attribute to physicists. Her thoughts on beauty in visual art and in physics were a welcome addition to the book.
Marx’s connection to atomism
This will take a minute.
De rerum natura, a six-volume poem by Lucretius (mentioned under the Poetry and physics subhead of this posting), helped to establish the concept of atomism. As it turns out, Lucretius got the idea from earlier thinkers, Epicurus and Democritus.
Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation, which focused on Lucretius, Epicurus and more, suggests an interest in science that may have led to his desire to establish economics as a science. From Cambridge University Press’s “Approaches to Lucretius; Traditions and Innovations in Reading the De Rerum Natura,” Chapter 12 – A Tribute to a Hero: Marx’s Interpretation of Epicurus in his Dissertation,
Summary
This chapter turns to Karl Marx’s treatment of Epicureanism and Lucretius [emphasis mine] in his doctoral dissertation, and argues that the questions raised by Marx may be brought to bear on our own understanding of Epicurean philosophy, particularly in respect of a tension between determinism and individual self-consciousness in a universe governed by material causation. Following the contours of Marx’s dissertation [emphasis mine], the chapter focusses on three key topics: the difference between Democritus’ and Epicurus’ methods of philosophy; the swerve of the atom; and the so-called ‘meteors’, or heavenly bodies [emphasis mine]. Marx sought to develop Hegel’s understanding of Epicurus, in particular by elevating the principle of autonomous action to a first form of self-consciousness – a consideration largely mediated by Lucretius’ theorization of the atomic swerve and his poem’s overarching framework of liberating humans from the oppression of the gods.
Fascinating, eh? The rest of this is behind a paywall. For the interested, here’s a citation and link for the book,
Approaches to Lucretius; Traditions and Innovations in Reading the De Rerum Natura Edited by Donncha O’Rourke, University of Edinburgh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press Online publication date: June 2020 Print publication year: 2020 Online ISBN: 9781108379854
It’s a little surprising Derksen doesn’t mention the connection in his essay.
Finally
It’s an interesting book if not an easy one. (By the way, I wish they’d included an index.) You can get a preview of some of the artwork in the January 6, 2020 article on the Canadian Art Magazine website.
I can’t rid myself of the feeling that LOoW (the book) is meant to function as a ‘proof of concept’ for someone wanting to start an art/science department or programme at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, perhaps jointly with the University of British Columbia. It is highly unusual to see this sort of material in anything other than a research journal or as a final summary to the granting agency.
Should starting an art/science programme be the intention, I hope they are successful in getting such it together and, in the meantime, thank you to the physicists and artists for their work.
We should all ‘lean out of windows’ on occasion and, if it means, falling or encountering ‘dangerous, uncomfortable ideas’ then, that’s alright too.
Caption: Dr. Maciej Lisicki is developing a formula for perfectly creamy ice cream in his laboratory. Credit Photo: Michal Czerepaniak, source: Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw.
It’s unusual to see a scientist in an orange (maybe it could be called fire engine red?) jumpsuit as it has an altogether different meaning (prison wear) in the US.
Take four brilliant physicists who specialize in fluid mechanics and put them in the kitchen. Give them pots, pans, basic foodstuffs, and a bottle of champagne. Add a COVID-19 pandemic, a pinch of boredom, and a handful of good ideas. Stir, wait, and voilà – you have a “delicious” publication that will teach you how bubbles are created in champagne, how to brew the perfect espresso, and how “kitchen revolutions” can contribute to innovations in many fields, including biomedicine and nanotechnology.
Most of us visit this place every day. But the kitchen is not just for cooking meals. “It can be an excellent place to conduct experiments and even make scientific discoveries,” argues Maciej Lisicki, of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw, co-author of a publication in the prestigious journal Reviews of Modern Physics. The team of researchers, which in addition to Maciej Lisicki includes Arnold Mathijssen of the University of Pennsylvania, Endre J.L. Mossige of the University of Oslo and Vivek N. Prakash of the University of Miami, not only explores the history of food science, but also shows how phenomena in the kitchen lead to innovations in biomedicine and nanotechnology.
COVID pandemic and bubbles in champagne
Maciej Lisicki and his fellow researchers began working on the article during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many researchers could not work in the lab and began experimenting in their homes. “It started primarily with the intention to make an educational tool, given that kitchens offer a low barrier of entry to doing science — all you need are some pots, pans, and a few ingredients to get a few reactions going—but it quickly grew into a more scientific reflection of the history of food once we realized how interwoven the fields are,” says Arnold Mathijssen.
The team of researchers constructed the results of their work along the lines of a menu. “Tasting” begins with the physics of drinks and cocktails, then moves on to main courses, and finishes with coffee and desserts, whose preparation is also based on the intuitive use of the laws of nature.
As with any good party, everything begins with the opening of a bottle of champagne. After a characteristic “pop”, we observe how a mist forms around the neck of the bottle. – This phenomenon is associated with a rapid change in pressure. Inside the bottle it reaches almost five atmospheres, but when the bottle is opened it drops to one atmosphere. “The expansion is accompanied by a drop in temperature, which causes the water vapor that accumulates near the mouth of the bottle to freeze, and the carbon dioxide coming out of the bottle to condense”, Maciej Lisicki explains.
In their paper, the researchers also look at bubbles, which give sparkling wines their unique flavor. “Circulating bubbles force the transport of the liquid in the glass, and thus facilitate the release and spread of aromatic notes and flavors”, the researcher adds. From the section of the paper devoted to drinks and cocktails, we will also learn what makes the foam in beer so thick and stable, why aniseed drinks such as rakija and ouzo get cloudy when enough water is added (the phenomenon is even called the “ouzo effect”), and what “tears of wine” are.
When water surfs the pan
Moving on to the main course, the scientists explain the role of heat and its effect on food textures, aromas, and flavors. Among other things, they describe the Leidenfrost effect, in which a drop of liquid placed on a very hot surface forms an insulating layer of vapor, that prevents rapid boiling. “Water drops thrown onto the pan ‘surf’ and even bounce off the surface, instead of evaporating immediately”, Lisicki says.
Proper temperature is crucial in the preparation of many foods. “It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in physics to fry the perfect steak. Everyone knows that one needs to quickly sear the meat in a sufficiently hot pan. As a result, the proteins on the surface of the steak coagulate and the moisture is kept inside”, the researcher explains.
A Ph.D. in dishwashing
The text also includes examples of scientific discoveries that researchers have made without leaving their own kitchens. One of them is related to the biography of Agnes Pockels.
“Her story speaks of the inequality in science. She was a woman in Germany in the late 19th century, so she was not allowed to attend university for formal training, making it difficult for her to submit her research to journals,” Mathijssen says.
Running her parents’ household and spending a lot of time in the kitchen, she quickly began experimenting there. “Observing the formation of foam and films on the surface of dirty dishes, she was the first to describe the phenomenon of surface tension and developed an instrument to measure it. Initially, scientific journals were reluctant to publish the results of her experiments due to her lack of formal training and affiliation with university staff. Her first paper was published through Lord Rayleigh in Nature and contributed to the understanding of surface effects in liquids. Agnes Pockels then became well-known and respected, and all her subsequent work was published in high-profile journals. This example shows that it is possible to become a respected scientist without leaving home,” notes Maciej Lisicki.
Salad dressing vs. nanoengineering
Research in fluid mechanics can help improve food processing technologies, as well as find applications in other fields such as nanoengineering and medicine. “In an earlier study (“Rechargeable self-assembled droplet microswimmers driven by surface phase transitions”, published in Nature Physics) conducted by my team, we used a simple emulsion that is the basis of salad dressings – oil with water. We were able to make droplets of such an emulsion, with the addition of a surfactant, form tendrils under temperature and move like bacteria. Such nontoxic, biocompatible microfluidics could be used in the future, for example, to precisely deliver drugs anywhere in our bodies”, Lisicki explains.
The review also highlights the applicability of these technologies in areas such as food safety and quality control. By deploying devices that can detect food-borne pathogens or toxins using principles of fluid dynamics, the scientific community can contribute significantly to public health.
Another key aspect of their review is the potential impact it could have on policy decisions, particularly those related to environmental sustainability and food safety. The authors highlight the significance of science-based policies, for example – referencing the announced EU ban on PFAS non-stick coatings by 2030. Using the scientific understanding offered by studies like these, policy makers can make informed decisions to foster a more sustainable and safer food future.
“Kitchen flows show us that significant scientific problems are available at our fingertips and do not always require space technology to explore them. On the other hand, more than a few cosmic technologies were born from inspiration by everyday phenomena. The kitchen can therefore entertain us, but also teach us – in this case, physics. This is why it is worth a try to unleash your curiosity and experiment!” Lisicki adds.
This research was supported by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA-NIFA AFRI 2020-67017-30776 and 2020-67015-32330).
Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw Physics and astronomy at the University of Warsaw appeared in 1816 as part of the then Faculty of Philosophy. In 1825, the Astronomical Observatory was established. Currently, the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw consists of the following institutes: Experimental Physics, Theoretical Physics, Geophysics, the Department of Mathematical Methods and the Astronomical Observatory. The research covers almost all areas of modern physics, on scales from quantum to cosmological. The Faculty’s research and teaching staff consists of over 200 academic teachers, 88 of whom are professors. About 1,100 students and over 170 doctoral students study at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw.
Perhaps the paper provides more information about the ice cream research depicted in the visual image at the top of this posting. Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
