Nobody does it like Gilberto Gil. Nobody. A one man powerhouse of ideas, music and insight, Gilberto was one of the front men of the late 1960s revolutionary Tropicalia movement which brought foreign influences and the voicing of social conscience directly into Brazillian music.
With the poet Torquato Mento, Gil wrote what became the hymn of the Torpical movement - Geleir Geral:
A poet unfurls the flag
And the tropical morn begins to beat
Resplendent, cascading, gracious
A joyous sunflower heat
In the general jam of Brazil
That the Jornal do Brasil will greet
With Tropicalia, Gil became a global superstar and then shocked everyone by becoming Brazil's Minister of Culture in 2003, exciting another cultural revolution for the 21st century, this time in cultural policy. Pontos de Cultura focuses on the dispossessed and disenfranchised, creating a network of belonging and social change through the arts, supported by the Brazilian Government. But what has this got to do with physics? At first glance not alot.
Quanta, Gil's 32nd album released in 1997, shows as ever Gilberto Gil's focus on living and creativity. It is a heady blend of sambas, country, rock, forros, funk, ballads and boss nova rhythms and won the Grammy for World Music. But that's what one expects from Gil. What makes it so unusual is that it is an albulm all about art and science - as one of its samba tracks, 'Cinenci e Arte, makes explicit.
The lyrics of the title track say it all: "I know that art is the sister of science, both daughters of a fleeting God who makes and in the same moment unmakes. This vague God behind the world, from behind the behind." The albulm's quest for meaning through its elaborate series of short song cycles is thus set.
Another song, 'Pela Internet' (For the Internet) is a buoyant starry eyed ode to the information super highway, describing the evolution of communications.
However, Gil's image in this song isn't the internet as a superhighway, but instead as an "infosea," where the port of call receives not slave ships and merchandise, but diskettes and far flung missives. "I want to enter the net," sings Gil, "to contact the homes in Nepal, the bars in Gabon, that the carioca chief of police warns on his mobile."
It is this infinite web of possibilities and social connection which the internet offers, which was to become nearly 20 years after he wrote this song, the heart of Gilberto Gil's radical Pontos de Cultura policy.
The song is doubly ironic too. In form and style, Gilberto Gil draws comparison with what is considered to be the first samba ever recorded in Brazillian music, 'Pelo Telefone'. The last verses in Gil's song are an update of the original lyrics - bringing it up to date for the internet world, and the finale is a parody o Rolling Stones 'I Cant Get No Satisfaction' with playful vocal adlibs echoing Mick Jagger's endless quest for satisfaction with the line, sneered in English during the fade, "Got no connection!"
There are many shout outs throughout the albulm - embracing language from quantum mechanics, crab vendors and the goddess Shiva. But the ghost in this musical machine is undoubtedly physics. The albulm is in all but name dedicated to Brazil's most distinguished and honoured physicist, Cesar Lattes. Lattes was one of the discoverers of the pion - a subatomic partcile made of a quark and an antiquark and studied cosmic rays for all of his life. He came close to winning the Nobel prize twice, but never did.
The albulm contains an open letter from Lattes to Gil, in which he analyses the lyrics and the songs, observing
I ask only that you let me tell you of the happiness that your words about physics give me, but in some cases there is poetic license:
The "infinitesimal" is a mathematical fiction. Quantum is the minimum action (energy x time).
This theme of minimalism is reflected in the albulm on many levels. None of the twenty songs runs over four-and-a-half minutes, but together they amount to what has been called 'a sprawling, hungry embrace of everything from Gil's African roots, to God and the cosmos, to personal reflections, to the wowing possibilities of the Internet.'
Lattes ends his letter movingly with these observations directly to the great musician:
"Science and Art": moved and appreciate the attention.
Science inseminates subliminally.
Science is a younger sister (perhaps illegitimate)
Art: Camões asked for help from the ingenuity and art - not science.
Solomon says that "science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul" - the art, no. I will stop here, because Solomon also says: "Seek not to be too tight nor too wise: you want to ruin it?"
To conclude I quote a great architect, "When science is silent, art speaks" (Artigas).
With a hug,
Cesar Lattes
In the end, Quanta quanta is all about transformations - not only of the science and arts kind, but also of the society. The particle turned samba. A universe of possibilities in a quantum world. Quanta quanta
Sunday, 10 July 2011
Wednesday, 6 July 2011
ANTI-MATTER: MIND OVER MATTER
He says
It's all about
Mind over matter
Those moments on the trapeze
When a hand reaches out
Hand over heart
Over hand
Hand over
Heart.
You have to trust
That you will not fail
For 16 precious minutes in May, anti-matter was trapped at CERN for thelongest time on the planet. Held fast. Trap tight. In a vacuum. Like no place on earth, on earth. For a length of time not seen since the birth of the universe. It is arguably one of the most significant cultural moments on the planet - even aside from discovering the Higgs Boson.
The hand
that minds
the heart
that hands
the mind
the heart's
hand
Matters
And why? Because even though anti-matter does not exist today on earth, except when it is manmade like at CERN, without anti-matter we would not exist. There would be no beginnings - and indeed fewer endings. So capturing the disappeared is a moment of affirming exitsence. But somehow - and this is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science - at the beginning of the universe, matter and anti matter co-existed in equal amounts. And yet when the Big Bang threw them headlong into each other's arms, matter won over anti-matter - hence the world we live in, naturally is made of matter. The LhCB experiment at CERN is determined to find out why this is.
She says
It's all about
Matter over mind
Those moments on the trapeze
when a hand reaches out
Heart over
Hand over
Heart.
Essentially anti-matter is matter's time twin. A lone twin. A non twin-twin even. Because anti matter is essentially the same as matter except for one important fact - the electric charge on matter and anti-matter for some reason differs. This distinction leads to annihilation - because if anti matter comes in contact with matter, it will destroy itself.
Michael Doser, one of the physicists working on the Alpha experiment which achieved the historic trapping of anti-matter, believes that the arts have a role in helping us explain and understand anti-matter - taking us beyond the equations and formulas and experiments of particle physicists like himself:
"Much of science is mathematical. It is hard to go from maths which you know is correct to an intuitive understanding. For this, you have to go to an analogy which is flawed and never perfect. However until you can bring an equation into a visual analogue it is very hard to think about it fully. Once you find an analogue, then you can develop a much better understanding, and from this develop predictions which go beyond your understanding defined by the equations themselves. That is what art does for science"
You have to trust
that you will not fail
The mind
that hands
the heart
that minds
the heart's
hand
That's all that matters
No matter
But in essence, the arts have always been investigating the lone twin. The ying and yang of existence. The arts are predicated on absence - the absence of the thing itself, the idea, the feeling, person or an object. The arts stand in for what is not there or present at a particular moment in time. From the caves of Lascaux to the work of Rachel Whiteread, the arts have all been about non existence at the heart of existence. The arts are the negative charge.
Some arts explicitly engage with this idea of absence. Like Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (One Hundred Spaces 1995). She cast the spaces undet the chair, rendering the chair itself invisible and the invisible space beneath it visible, turning it in turn into a structure which could potentially be sat on or ate at.
Negative space has been the dominant form of Rachel Whiteread's work- turning negative space or emptiness into presence on a huge scale - like that of a house.
It is done to symbolise memory - that other great activity of the mind making present through mental thought what is no longer there.
But flip back in time, and those pictures of the horses, the man with the spear, and you have since earliest days of mankind, records of mankind now absence. Like those early examples of cunnieform - always standing in, always standing for what has been, making the non present, present. It is the art of knowing.
So in many ways, the arts can be seen as the anti-matter of science. Without it, science would not exist. Let alone the science of anti matter itself. The negative charge of the absent. The positive charge of the arts.
It's all about
Mind over matter
Those moments on the trapeze
When a hand reaches out
Hand over heart
Over hand
Hand over
Heart.
You have to trust
That you will not fail
For 16 precious minutes in May, anti-matter was trapped at CERN for thelongest time on the planet. Held fast. Trap tight. In a vacuum. Like no place on earth, on earth. For a length of time not seen since the birth of the universe. It is arguably one of the most significant cultural moments on the planet - even aside from discovering the Higgs Boson.
The hand
that minds
the heart
that hands
the mind
the heart's
hand
Matters
And why? Because even though anti-matter does not exist today on earth, except when it is manmade like at CERN, without anti-matter we would not exist. There would be no beginnings - and indeed fewer endings. So capturing the disappeared is a moment of affirming exitsence. But somehow - and this is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science - at the beginning of the universe, matter and anti matter co-existed in equal amounts. And yet when the Big Bang threw them headlong into each other's arms, matter won over anti-matter - hence the world we live in, naturally is made of matter. The LhCB experiment at CERN is determined to find out why this is.
She says
It's all about
Matter over mind
Those moments on the trapeze
when a hand reaches out
Heart over
Hand over
Heart.
Essentially anti-matter is matter's time twin. A lone twin. A non twin-twin even. Because anti matter is essentially the same as matter except for one important fact - the electric charge on matter and anti-matter for some reason differs. This distinction leads to annihilation - because if anti matter comes in contact with matter, it will destroy itself.
Michael Doser, one of the physicists working on the Alpha experiment which achieved the historic trapping of anti-matter, believes that the arts have a role in helping us explain and understand anti-matter - taking us beyond the equations and formulas and experiments of particle physicists like himself:
"Much of science is mathematical. It is hard to go from maths which you know is correct to an intuitive understanding. For this, you have to go to an analogy which is flawed and never perfect. However until you can bring an equation into a visual analogue it is very hard to think about it fully. Once you find an analogue, then you can develop a much better understanding, and from this develop predictions which go beyond your understanding defined by the equations themselves. That is what art does for science"
You have to trust
that you will not fail
The mind
that hands
the heart
that minds
the heart's
hand
That's all that matters
No matter
But in essence, the arts have always been investigating the lone twin. The ying and yang of existence. The arts are predicated on absence - the absence of the thing itself, the idea, the feeling, person or an object. The arts stand in for what is not there or present at a particular moment in time. From the caves of Lascaux to the work of Rachel Whiteread, the arts have all been about non existence at the heart of existence. The arts are the negative charge.
Some arts explicitly engage with this idea of absence. Like Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (One Hundred Spaces 1995). She cast the spaces undet the chair, rendering the chair itself invisible and the invisible space beneath it visible, turning it in turn into a structure which could potentially be sat on or ate at.
Negative space has been the dominant form of Rachel Whiteread's work- turning negative space or emptiness into presence on a huge scale - like that of a house.
It is done to symbolise memory - that other great activity of the mind making present through mental thought what is no longer there.
But flip back in time, and those pictures of the horses, the man with the spear, and you have since earliest days of mankind, records of mankind now absence. Like those early examples of cunnieform - always standing in, always standing for what has been, making the non present, present. It is the art of knowing.
So in many ways, the arts can be seen as the anti-matter of science. Without it, science would not exist. Let alone the science of anti matter itself. The negative charge of the absent. The positive charge of the arts.
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
THE MATHEMATICS OF CROWD SOURCING
The seeds for the forest were sewn playing chess. When he was 8 year s old, Andreas came face to face with the great Chess Grandmaster Kasparov. Pawn in hand, he made the first move. But Andreas was not alone. With him were 5 other 8 year old german chess players too, all as eager as he to make the opening gambit. And so it was, that a team of 6 8 year olds beat the great grandmaster of the game – proving that six heads are definitely much better than one – even the biggest and best one.
“People say that there are no scientists like Einstein today. But I say that doesn't matter. Much better to have a crowd of scientists not as good as Einstein, than to have one Einstein. My experience with Kasparov showed this.”
So says the now 48 year old Andreas, who is one of the leaders in the field of probability at CERN. And when he starts talking, you realize that the public and social trend for crowd sourcing in fact has a truly mathematical as well as experiential basis for delivering results. That in fact it is maths which really has created and driven the crowd sourcing phenomenon of today. We are merely following the numbers.
“We have developed Boost Tree Decision Making. Basically, you plant a decision and then go down the decision tree, until you get to the leaf – the most probable and true answer,” says Andreas. It is truly as simple as that. Or so it sounds when an expert describes it so simply in words. The algorithms to get there are another matter.
But in fact Boost Decision Tree Making does not stop there. In fact it has been shown that you don't just plant one tree to get the right answers. You plant many trees, with short roots, leading to quicker multiple answers. It turns out that one tree does not a forest make because it doesn't give you the full complete picture or the true answer after all. This is because if you just plant a decision and follow the roots to get to the answers, they will only come from one source and one starting point. Thus they can only be a binary variant on the same tree, rather than creating a whole forest of trees, which gives you the whole landscape of a forest to look at and check the verity of your answers. At least that is how I understand it. It gives a whole new slant to that expression not seeing the wood for the trees.
This algorithmic path to truth also has social application and others too which are part of our daily lives.
“Take your iLife on your mac” says Andreas. “You put in your photograph and it will go through the internet looking for matches, following an algorithmic path. That’s boost tree decision trees at work.” It works like magic - and like magic, it is in the end, all about numbers.
But that is not all. The Boost Decision Trees method also has a military application too, becoming the tool for decisions about making air strikes and selecting targets – an altogether much less palatable application for what was conceived of as a tool to link not destroy humanity. The twin sides of technology – revealing itself in the forest of our psyche.
BOOST DECISION TREES
http://www.ehow.com/how_5130809_boost-decision-trees.html
“People say that there are no scientists like Einstein today. But I say that doesn't matter. Much better to have a crowd of scientists not as good as Einstein, than to have one Einstein. My experience with Kasparov showed this.”
So says the now 48 year old Andreas, who is one of the leaders in the field of probability at CERN. And when he starts talking, you realize that the public and social trend for crowd sourcing in fact has a truly mathematical as well as experiential basis for delivering results. That in fact it is maths which really has created and driven the crowd sourcing phenomenon of today. We are merely following the numbers.
“We have developed Boost Tree Decision Making. Basically, you plant a decision and then go down the decision tree, until you get to the leaf – the most probable and true answer,” says Andreas. It is truly as simple as that. Or so it sounds when an expert describes it so simply in words. The algorithms to get there are another matter.
But in fact Boost Decision Tree Making does not stop there. In fact it has been shown that you don't just plant one tree to get the right answers. You plant many trees, with short roots, leading to quicker multiple answers. It turns out that one tree does not a forest make because it doesn't give you the full complete picture or the true answer after all. This is because if you just plant a decision and follow the roots to get to the answers, they will only come from one source and one starting point. Thus they can only be a binary variant on the same tree, rather than creating a whole forest of trees, which gives you the whole landscape of a forest to look at and check the verity of your answers. At least that is how I understand it. It gives a whole new slant to that expression not seeing the wood for the trees.
This algorithmic path to truth also has social application and others too which are part of our daily lives.
“Take your iLife on your mac” says Andreas. “You put in your photograph and it will go through the internet looking for matches, following an algorithmic path. That’s boost tree decision trees at work.” It works like magic - and like magic, it is in the end, all about numbers.
But that is not all. The Boost Decision Trees method also has a military application too, becoming the tool for decisions about making air strikes and selecting targets – an altogether much less palatable application for what was conceived of as a tool to link not destroy humanity. The twin sides of technology – revealing itself in the forest of our psyche.
BOOST DECISION TREES
http://www.ehow.com/how_5130809_boost-decision-trees.html
Wednesday, 1 December 2010
OF STARS AND WHALES
Whales sing at the same frequencies as stars... when you know that, you realise that the universe we live in is integrated and interconnected. It isn't a space of disconnections and dislocations, but instead it is one where we constantly discover and explore what it truly means to be part of a connected world. Social networks and media technology are mere mimicry of what already exists in the world. That's what the whale song reminds us. Let alone the giant neutrino telescopes on the sea bed which are now enabling us to eavesdrop on the sounds of the deep ocean.
Go to the LIDO (Listen to the Deep Ocean) site - http://listentothedeep.com - and the whole soundscape of the ocean is yours at home right now. The ocean is as close as your breath. The sound is next to the beat of your heart. There are charts which tell you what you are listening to at any one given moment, so you can identify what you eavesdrop on. Who knows, it could be one of the sperm whales in the mediterranean which the LIDO network of seafloor observatories were the first to discover were there.
This act of listening to the deep blue is an illicit pleasure. Somehow the sounds of the oceans are more radically mysterious to us in this visually dominated age saturated by underwater footage which has probed the mysteries of the big blue that it mainlines into our consciousness. It's like having a shot of adrenalin fuelled by imagination. And this is all thanks to those giant eyes - the neutrino telescopes - on the ocean beds around France, Italy and Greece which were made with the purpose of detecting the cosmic rays which fall from outer space, but which now have ironically become great ears as well. Keep your eyes and ears open.
It seems that particle physics is on a mission to replicate our sensory organs - making them bigger and better, in order to fully comprehend Nature in all its monumental grandeur. The detectors used in particle physics at CERN and Fermilab in the USA are nothing but giant eyes enabling us to see the invisible. Stare at them when they are unpeeled, and even then their resemblance to the iris of an eye is astounding. The cosmic ray neutrino telescopes are giant ears of the deep oceans. And so LIDO was born...through the accident of discovering that as well as detecting the cosmic rays falling down to earth from deep space above, they could also detect the sounds of deep space below.
But that's not all. The LIDO network is also a way of us monitoring the movement of the earth itself - earthquakes seismic shifts, tsuanamis - as well as bioacoustics and anthropogenic noise which are normally inaudible to the human ear. These telescopes are the ultimate guardians planted in the sea like in a Greek myth, monitoring sounds, movements and sights in the Mediterranean Sea and the adjacent Atlantic waters.
And so, we can keep watchful and earful guard on the planet we live on. Thanks to them, we have the ocean on our sitting room floor and encounter a whale as we read in the bath. Time and space - the great dimensions of our world - have been superseded by new technology so that nothing now is impossible - because our imaginations then can take us the ultimate distance. But the question is, will we ever run out of mystery? And if we do, what will our lives be without discovery? Could we live our lives without it? The eyes and ears have it.
Go to the LIDO (Listen to the Deep Ocean) site - http://listentothedeep.com - and the whole soundscape of the ocean is yours at home right now. The ocean is as close as your breath. The sound is next to the beat of your heart. There are charts which tell you what you are listening to at any one given moment, so you can identify what you eavesdrop on. Who knows, it could be one of the sperm whales in the mediterranean which the LIDO network of seafloor observatories were the first to discover were there.
This act of listening to the deep blue is an illicit pleasure. Somehow the sounds of the oceans are more radically mysterious to us in this visually dominated age saturated by underwater footage which has probed the mysteries of the big blue that it mainlines into our consciousness. It's like having a shot of adrenalin fuelled by imagination. And this is all thanks to those giant eyes - the neutrino telescopes - on the ocean beds around France, Italy and Greece which were made with the purpose of detecting the cosmic rays which fall from outer space, but which now have ironically become great ears as well. Keep your eyes and ears open.
It seems that particle physics is on a mission to replicate our sensory organs - making them bigger and better, in order to fully comprehend Nature in all its monumental grandeur. The detectors used in particle physics at CERN and Fermilab in the USA are nothing but giant eyes enabling us to see the invisible. Stare at them when they are unpeeled, and even then their resemblance to the iris of an eye is astounding. The cosmic ray neutrino telescopes are giant ears of the deep oceans. And so LIDO was born...through the accident of discovering that as well as detecting the cosmic rays falling down to earth from deep space above, they could also detect the sounds of deep space below.
But that's not all. The LIDO network is also a way of us monitoring the movement of the earth itself - earthquakes seismic shifts, tsuanamis - as well as bioacoustics and anthropogenic noise which are normally inaudible to the human ear. These telescopes are the ultimate guardians planted in the sea like in a Greek myth, monitoring sounds, movements and sights in the Mediterranean Sea and the adjacent Atlantic waters.
And so, we can keep watchful and earful guard on the planet we live on. Thanks to them, we have the ocean on our sitting room floor and encounter a whale as we read in the bath. Time and space - the great dimensions of our world - have been superseded by new technology so that nothing now is impossible - because our imaginations then can take us the ultimate distance. But the question is, will we ever run out of mystery? And if we do, what will our lives be without discovery? Could we live our lives without it? The eyes and ears have it.
Saturday, 23 October 2010
THE EYES HAVE IT
Go hunting for crocodiles, and you will find mirrors in their eyes. Take a flash light in the dead of night, a fair am amount of your own good eye sight, and a great deal of courage, and as you track them down in the Amazon basin, you will discover a 100 glowing lamps in the water and gliding on the river banks. These are the mirrors at the back of the retina of the Amazonian crocodile – a peculiar evolution for these slip-slide navigators of the dark – which scoop up the luminosity of your flash light and reflect it back to you: the hunter turned prey. Inverted sight.
Such is the beauty of talking to a particle physicist, that narratives unfold before you in the course of what may appear to be a simple conversation. It’s like always being in Alice in Wonderland. There is one door open, but suddenly you find yourself falling through one in the floor. Or shooting up to a skylight as if propelled by wings. This narrative had started, like they all do, with what seemed like a simple question. Why is Alan working with neurobiologists investigating colour ? The story would take us to crocodiles, via Pablo and Paloma Picasso, the Salke Institute, Woody Allen, CERN, Louis Khan, Brooklyn and back again – and all the time at the centre of the narrative was the wonder of the human eye. How it receives images about the world and helps us navigate the world replete with matter.
Alan is baffled. For most of his career he worked in physics, constructing the silicon detectors which can see the invisible - detect and track particles which make up the universe. He was bemused when he discovered by looking at biology, that in fact all he was doing was constructing what already existed in nature. It's what drives him continuously to make the link between physics and neurobiology - against the grain of funding and silo-orientated science.
'Look at the detectors, and they are nothing but giant eyes,' he says. It reminds me of my first blog entry when I said just that. But it is more than that. Unwittingly, when building the great hexagons, physicists and engineers were mimicing the shape of the rods in our eyes which let light in - and out - and enable us to see. They are hexagonal too, in order to make sure they let in the most amount of light possible.
The unwitting symmetry between man and Nature is startling. And Alain is now on the quest of understanding Nature so as to improve science and technology.
'Do you know that when we see something, we actually see it in our eyes as 22 different images? But then our brain reorientates these images and collates them, giving us just one.' I didnt. And as ever, I feel inspired to think about how the arts can engage with this observation, as well as wonder what happens when the brain just cant manage this consilience and if there are people who see more than one image when they look at the world. Or whether that is what artists really are - because somewhere their brain is resounding with the memory of the discarded other ways of looking. Perhaps imagination is the ghost of the eye.
'Did you know that Woody Allen always tells physics jokes?' Another thing I didnt know. How we got to this seemingly random conversation is through discovering that Alan, like my father, is a Brooklyn boy, and Woody Allen is too, of course. All 3 are contemporaries - good jewish boys - and Alan turns out to have tried to gatecrash a Woody Allen concert in Geneva by telling a Woody Allen joke to a film crew. It won him the right to free entry. So I look up some of these jokes which have worked such magic:
Saying you know how to get around the universe is like going around China Town without a map
Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought - particularly for people who cannot remember where they left things.
"She caught his eye, became his mistress, but was also the only woman ever to leave him' Alan again, now telling the story of Francoise Gilot, who was the mistress of Picasso when only 21, but left him, then later fell in love with the vaccine pioneer Jonas Salke, who founded the famous science institution in america, the Salke Institute, built by the extraordinary Louis Khan, who in turn inspired by father. It turns out Francoise's daughter by Picasso, Paloma, is now the fundraiser for the institute...
And so the connections continue and spin into the swirl of afternoon coffee at CERN. Picasso by way of Allen by way of Brooklyn and amazonian crocodiles - a cartography of a random conversation which revolves around the beauty of the eye.
For a detailed article about Alan Litke's pioneering work, see
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000591
Such is the beauty of talking to a particle physicist, that narratives unfold before you in the course of what may appear to be a simple conversation. It’s like always being in Alice in Wonderland. There is one door open, but suddenly you find yourself falling through one in the floor. Or shooting up to a skylight as if propelled by wings. This narrative had started, like they all do, with what seemed like a simple question. Why is Alan working with neurobiologists investigating colour ? The story would take us to crocodiles, via Pablo and Paloma Picasso, the Salke Institute, Woody Allen, CERN, Louis Khan, Brooklyn and back again – and all the time at the centre of the narrative was the wonder of the human eye. How it receives images about the world and helps us navigate the world replete with matter.
Alan is baffled. For most of his career he worked in physics, constructing the silicon detectors which can see the invisible - detect and track particles which make up the universe. He was bemused when he discovered by looking at biology, that in fact all he was doing was constructing what already existed in nature. It's what drives him continuously to make the link between physics and neurobiology - against the grain of funding and silo-orientated science.
'Look at the detectors, and they are nothing but giant eyes,' he says. It reminds me of my first blog entry when I said just that. But it is more than that. Unwittingly, when building the great hexagons, physicists and engineers were mimicing the shape of the rods in our eyes which let light in - and out - and enable us to see. They are hexagonal too, in order to make sure they let in the most amount of light possible.
The unwitting symmetry between man and Nature is startling. And Alain is now on the quest of understanding Nature so as to improve science and technology.
'Do you know that when we see something, we actually see it in our eyes as 22 different images? But then our brain reorientates these images and collates them, giving us just one.' I didnt. And as ever, I feel inspired to think about how the arts can engage with this observation, as well as wonder what happens when the brain just cant manage this consilience and if there are people who see more than one image when they look at the world. Or whether that is what artists really are - because somewhere their brain is resounding with the memory of the discarded other ways of looking. Perhaps imagination is the ghost of the eye.
'Did you know that Woody Allen always tells physics jokes?' Another thing I didnt know. How we got to this seemingly random conversation is through discovering that Alan, like my father, is a Brooklyn boy, and Woody Allen is too, of course. All 3 are contemporaries - good jewish boys - and Alan turns out to have tried to gatecrash a Woody Allen concert in Geneva by telling a Woody Allen joke to a film crew. It won him the right to free entry. So I look up some of these jokes which have worked such magic:
Saying you know how to get around the universe is like going around China Town without a map
Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought - particularly for people who cannot remember where they left things.
"She caught his eye, became his mistress, but was also the only woman ever to leave him' Alan again, now telling the story of Francoise Gilot, who was the mistress of Picasso when only 21, but left him, then later fell in love with the vaccine pioneer Jonas Salke, who founded the famous science institution in america, the Salke Institute, built by the extraordinary Louis Khan, who in turn inspired by father. It turns out Francoise's daughter by Picasso, Paloma, is now the fundraiser for the institute...
And so the connections continue and spin into the swirl of afternoon coffee at CERN. Picasso by way of Allen by way of Brooklyn and amazonian crocodiles - a cartography of a random conversation which revolves around the beauty of the eye.
For a detailed article about Alan Litke's pioneering work, see
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000591
Thursday, 7 October 2010
TAKE YOUR PARTNERS
A dance piece, conversation, floor show, game show and a chance to meet big minds. That’s how MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ fellow and award-winning american choreographer, Liz Lerman bills her latest multi-media piece, ‘The Matter of Origins’. As the title playfully suggests, physics is the main partner for this new work, with dancers making equations with their bodies and pushing gravity to the limits.
But that’s not all. Physics also provides the intellectual framework on which the whole piece hangs. For one hour, in a fusion of dance and physics, dancers both old and young, spin, leap, fall, balance and re-balance through critical moments of atomic and sub-atomic history: Marie Curie and the discovery of radium, the Manhatten project, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Hubble telescope.
These historical moments also provide the stunning visuals for the scenery too – with the vast swathes of the New Mexico desert surrounding Los Alamos and a video tour of the LHC at CERN projected into the dance space. ‘The Matter of Origins’ is a fusion between the ideas of physics with the physical possibilities - and impossibilities - of dance. The normally reticent Washington Post critically acclaimed the world premiere at the University of Maryland, USA, this September as ‘a work of expansive range, emotional depth and singular beauty.’
The story of how this partnership between dance and physics happened was a total surprise, even to the choreographer. It began with a chance encounter between Liz Lerman, who has run her own dance company Dance Exchange since 1976, with Gordy Kane, a physicist at the University of Michigan and director of the Michigan Centre for Theoretical Physics. He knew that she was interested in science and the impact it has on the way people think about themselves, having seen her previous work ‘Ferocious Beauty: Genome’ which examined the nature of discovery and the implications of research into genetics.
He captivated her interest this time in physics, by telling her about the search for the origins of the universe at CERN, and the mysteries of dark matter. So she came with her company of dancers to CERN for a few weeks in 2007 and then in 2008 to explore making a piece, speaking to the scientists about their ideas, and even dancing in the LHC tunnels and work spaces. And so the beginning of ‘The Matter of Origins’ project was born, and in the process she started discovering many unusual and quirky facts of the history of physics, which appear insignificant but which also nevertheless find their way into her piece.
For example, the extraordinary story of Edith Warner who has hired by Robert Oppenheimer when he was director of Los Alamos to feed the physicists. She ran the Los Alamos tea house, serving her special chocolate cake to amongst others, a scientist she knew as Doctor Baker, but who was in fact Niels Bohr. The audience at the ‘Matter of Origins’ is literally invited to chew over this fact – and many others, including Warner’s secret chocolate cake recipe – because when the dance has finished in Act One, in Act Two they are all unexpectedly swept into a room full of tea, tables and chocolate cake and asked to sit down. At each table is a host – or provacateur as Liz calls them, who is more often than not a physicist – who invites the audience to discuss what they experienced watching the dance piece, as well as the big science and its relation to society and the uncertainty principle and future possibilities. It is an extraordinary and exceptional bravura move which Liz easily explains:
“Act one is in the European terms a multi-media piece, with a video artist and animator as well as the dancers and the science. It is a lot for an audience to take in. In my last science-dance piece, I noticed that the audience lingered and stayed to discuss the piece far more than normal. They didn’t want a post performance discussion: they wanted to be the discussion.
So my idea was to make this happen, giving individuals the change to re-experience what they had just witnessed and to deepen their experience even further.”
Thus, between tea and talk, dancers weave between the tables too, adding yet more dimensions to this piece, including discussions about the uncertainty principle, which Liz says, in many ways, is where every artist stands. ‘For an artist it is always a question of finding momentum and of poise whilst in uncertainty.’
For all the discussion about the uncertainty principle, Liz is also adamant about another aspect of the dance and physics partnership which shows how they share common ground. It isn’t just in the intellectual footwork:
“The arts are the place which can help people find the place where they intersect with science. Awe, imagination and the grit to be relentless to make something work – that’s what scientists and artists both do. What is fascinating in both cases, is the relationships scientists and artists have to making mistakes - how we puzzle over them, and the obsession and passion which ensures that we get it right in the end.”
But as Liz’s piece shows, we may be merely at the beginning. Act Two ends with the beginning of Act One. The end has become a new beginning. Or perhaps it is just the beginning is never ending.
Note: This piece is being published in the next edition of the CERN Courier in November
http://cerncourier.com/cws/latest/cern
But that’s not all. Physics also provides the intellectual framework on which the whole piece hangs. For one hour, in a fusion of dance and physics, dancers both old and young, spin, leap, fall, balance and re-balance through critical moments of atomic and sub-atomic history: Marie Curie and the discovery of radium, the Manhatten project, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Hubble telescope.
These historical moments also provide the stunning visuals for the scenery too – with the vast swathes of the New Mexico desert surrounding Los Alamos and a video tour of the LHC at CERN projected into the dance space. ‘The Matter of Origins’ is a fusion between the ideas of physics with the physical possibilities - and impossibilities - of dance. The normally reticent Washington Post critically acclaimed the world premiere at the University of Maryland, USA, this September as ‘a work of expansive range, emotional depth and singular beauty.’
The story of how this partnership between dance and physics happened was a total surprise, even to the choreographer. It began with a chance encounter between Liz Lerman, who has run her own dance company Dance Exchange since 1976, with Gordy Kane, a physicist at the University of Michigan and director of the Michigan Centre for Theoretical Physics. He knew that she was interested in science and the impact it has on the way people think about themselves, having seen her previous work ‘Ferocious Beauty: Genome’ which examined the nature of discovery and the implications of research into genetics.
He captivated her interest this time in physics, by telling her about the search for the origins of the universe at CERN, and the mysteries of dark matter. So she came with her company of dancers to CERN for a few weeks in 2007 and then in 2008 to explore making a piece, speaking to the scientists about their ideas, and even dancing in the LHC tunnels and work spaces. And so the beginning of ‘The Matter of Origins’ project was born, and in the process she started discovering many unusual and quirky facts of the history of physics, which appear insignificant but which also nevertheless find their way into her piece.
For example, the extraordinary story of Edith Warner who has hired by Robert Oppenheimer when he was director of Los Alamos to feed the physicists. She ran the Los Alamos tea house, serving her special chocolate cake to amongst others, a scientist she knew as Doctor Baker, but who was in fact Niels Bohr. The audience at the ‘Matter of Origins’ is literally invited to chew over this fact – and many others, including Warner’s secret chocolate cake recipe – because when the dance has finished in Act One, in Act Two they are all unexpectedly swept into a room full of tea, tables and chocolate cake and asked to sit down. At each table is a host – or provacateur as Liz calls them, who is more often than not a physicist – who invites the audience to discuss what they experienced watching the dance piece, as well as the big science and its relation to society and the uncertainty principle and future possibilities. It is an extraordinary and exceptional bravura move which Liz easily explains:
“Act one is in the European terms a multi-media piece, with a video artist and animator as well as the dancers and the science. It is a lot for an audience to take in. In my last science-dance piece, I noticed that the audience lingered and stayed to discuss the piece far more than normal. They didn’t want a post performance discussion: they wanted to be the discussion.
So my idea was to make this happen, giving individuals the change to re-experience what they had just witnessed and to deepen their experience even further.”
Thus, between tea and talk, dancers weave between the tables too, adding yet more dimensions to this piece, including discussions about the uncertainty principle, which Liz says, in many ways, is where every artist stands. ‘For an artist it is always a question of finding momentum and of poise whilst in uncertainty.’
For all the discussion about the uncertainty principle, Liz is also adamant about another aspect of the dance and physics partnership which shows how they share common ground. It isn’t just in the intellectual footwork:
“The arts are the place which can help people find the place where they intersect with science. Awe, imagination and the grit to be relentless to make something work – that’s what scientists and artists both do. What is fascinating in both cases, is the relationships scientists and artists have to making mistakes - how we puzzle over them, and the obsession and passion which ensures that we get it right in the end.”
But as Liz’s piece shows, we may be merely at the beginning. Act Two ends with the beginning of Act One. The end has become a new beginning. Or perhaps it is just the beginning is never ending.
Note: This piece is being published in the next edition of the CERN Courier in November
http://cerncourier.com/cws/latest/cern
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
CHASING STARS
We were chasing the sky to change the colour of a star, through the velvet depths of a late summer night, until we catch one, for one single moment. Only for it to be just as suddenly swallowed whole by the hedgerows and curves and bends of the road.
‘You can only change the colour of the star when you are in line with it,’ you say. ‘When you can really see it in the sky. Try again. Now.’
It seems so impossible. It will never happen. The gyrating geography and slip-slide geometry of the road seem to defy catching the star in my sight for anything more than a nano-second. And there are our twin purposes, too, on this crazy roadtrip:
You – driving at breckneck speed to get me on the last train back to Geneva. But also wanting to show me your art.
I – dialling the telephone number of the star but desperately wanting to catch my last train home.
The number is engaged.
A momentary relaxation of the hedges and the curves and bends in the road suddenly gives way again to a forest which tears down the sky, and the star disappears behind clawing branches. More numbers punched in. The number is now vacant. We are lost again. Reduced again to one pursuit – devil-may-care-speed – with now not a single star in sight. Not even a real one.
It seems an impossible mission. And part of me thinks, do I even want to catch this star? Because if I do, will the change in its colour disappoint? The possibility of changing the colour of a star is so much more poetic, that I feel I want to keep that with me, rather than see the reality.
And as the thought comes, it is replaced by that bright star again. Straight ahead. Just there. No doubt about it.
“Here. Let me.” And you take the mobile with your right hand, whilst steering with your left, and punch in the numbers. I think we will crash. Your concentration is more on the phone than the road, your speed doesn’t diminish, and the wheels hit the banks at the side of the road and then veer into the lines which run like knives beneath us. We are on a collision mission - with what I do not know. It is terrifying.
‘Tiens. Ecoute. Has the star replied? It should say Etoile d’Ai.’ And suddenly I hear the voice of a speaking star. Female. Assured. Conspiratorial. But welcoming. 3, 8, 9, 2 , 1 – I punch in a galaxy of numbers, and sure enough, the star changes colour. Just like that. Honestly it does. Orange. Red, Purple. Green. Yellow and then White again. To change the colour of a star by chasing it in the sky – even the reality turns out to be poetic.
`Originally Etoile d’Ai was set up with a telephone company. But they stopped sponsoring the star when the project ended. Just like that. They turned it off.’ You explain.
Sponsoring a star…
“People would try and ring the star from their homes. Or when they were driving by and it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t let the star die. People were so upset.”
A dying star…
“I knew I had a responsibility to the people who could see it. For them, it had become their friend. Their anchor in the world. Which listened – and responded. They could see it from their gardens. Whisper it their dreams.”
Wishing on a star…
“I even got letters saying your star is the only thing which makes me not feel alone in the world. It gives me a real sense of belonging. It also made me feel so small.”
We all bring stars down to earth the moment we are born.
Stars lodge in our bones and shine in the light in our eyes…
For we are made of stardust and hold whole galaxies within
Perhaps that’s why we love them so much
We are all made of stars
“So I found a way round it. The digital world. It opens up even the heavens to all of us. Even artists. Now anyone can call up the star and change its colour. Just as long as you can see it. It’s free.”
I catch my train. You have shown me your work. All our wishes are fulfilled. The magic. The poetry. The practicality. The reality of it all. Existence in one 20 minute drive. All when we were chasing stars through the deep blue of night that late summer’s evening. Flying across the earth – in a vertigo of stars.
Etoile d’Ai
http://www.paysages-en-poesie.ch/a153.html
http://www.paysages-en-poesie.ch/english/a1.html
‘You can only change the colour of the star when you are in line with it,’ you say. ‘When you can really see it in the sky. Try again. Now.’
It seems so impossible. It will never happen. The gyrating geography and slip-slide geometry of the road seem to defy catching the star in my sight for anything more than a nano-second. And there are our twin purposes, too, on this crazy roadtrip:
You – driving at breckneck speed to get me on the last train back to Geneva. But also wanting to show me your art.
I – dialling the telephone number of the star but desperately wanting to catch my last train home.
The number is engaged.
A momentary relaxation of the hedges and the curves and bends in the road suddenly gives way again to a forest which tears down the sky, and the star disappears behind clawing branches. More numbers punched in. The number is now vacant. We are lost again. Reduced again to one pursuit – devil-may-care-speed – with now not a single star in sight. Not even a real one.
It seems an impossible mission. And part of me thinks, do I even want to catch this star? Because if I do, will the change in its colour disappoint? The possibility of changing the colour of a star is so much more poetic, that I feel I want to keep that with me, rather than see the reality.
And as the thought comes, it is replaced by that bright star again. Straight ahead. Just there. No doubt about it.
“Here. Let me.” And you take the mobile with your right hand, whilst steering with your left, and punch in the numbers. I think we will crash. Your concentration is more on the phone than the road, your speed doesn’t diminish, and the wheels hit the banks at the side of the road and then veer into the lines which run like knives beneath us. We are on a collision mission - with what I do not know. It is terrifying.
‘Tiens. Ecoute. Has the star replied? It should say Etoile d’Ai.’ And suddenly I hear the voice of a speaking star. Female. Assured. Conspiratorial. But welcoming. 3, 8, 9, 2 , 1 – I punch in a galaxy of numbers, and sure enough, the star changes colour. Just like that. Honestly it does. Orange. Red, Purple. Green. Yellow and then White again. To change the colour of a star by chasing it in the sky – even the reality turns out to be poetic.
`Originally Etoile d’Ai was set up with a telephone company. But they stopped sponsoring the star when the project ended. Just like that. They turned it off.’ You explain.
Sponsoring a star…
“People would try and ring the star from their homes. Or when they were driving by and it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t let the star die. People were so upset.”
A dying star…
“I knew I had a responsibility to the people who could see it. For them, it had become their friend. Their anchor in the world. Which listened – and responded. They could see it from their gardens. Whisper it their dreams.”
Wishing on a star…
“I even got letters saying your star is the only thing which makes me not feel alone in the world. It gives me a real sense of belonging. It also made me feel so small.”
We all bring stars down to earth the moment we are born.
Stars lodge in our bones and shine in the light in our eyes…
For we are made of stardust and hold whole galaxies within
Perhaps that’s why we love them so much
We are all made of stars
“So I found a way round it. The digital world. It opens up even the heavens to all of us. Even artists. Now anyone can call up the star and change its colour. Just as long as you can see it. It’s free.”
I catch my train. You have shown me your work. All our wishes are fulfilled. The magic. The poetry. The practicality. The reality of it all. Existence in one 20 minute drive. All when we were chasing stars through the deep blue of night that late summer’s evening. Flying across the earth – in a vertigo of stars.
Etoile d’Ai
http://www.paysages-en-poesie.ch/a153.html
http://www.paysages-en-poesie.ch/english/a1.html
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