Historical physics and astronomy as .gifs

 

Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642. Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti, 1613.

Put Galileo's 1612 drawings of sunspots together and what do you get (via Houghton Library, Harvard University)? 

Gifs taken from a 1929 film by Nobel laureate William Lawrence Bragg demonstrating his research into surface tension and spectroscopic analysis of light reflected from a soap film. (via the Royal Institution tumblr)

NASA imagery of Pioneer via the US National Archives on GIPHY

This work from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology,  Celestial scenery, or, The Wonders of the planetary system displayed (1845) was written by Thomas Dick, a Scottish minister and science educator. (via the Smithsonian)

And of course Eadweard Muybridge:

Mildred Thompson and the Art of the Cosmos

Mildred Thompson 'Magnetic Fields' 1990, oil on canvas, 70.5 x 150” (triptych)

 

American artist Mildred Jean Thompson (March 12, 1936 – September 1, 2003) worked in many media, including printmaking, sculpture, painting, drawing and photography, as well as a writer. Critics see the influence of German Expressionism, West African textiles, Islamic architecture, spiritualism, metaphysics music and particularly jazz as her work grew increasingly abstract and improvisational. All these things are important, but her interest in physics and astronomy also shines through in the art about music and sound, to the later work specifically about mathematics, magnetic fields, radiation, particles and planetary systems. Thompson said, “My work in the visual arts is, and always has been, a continuous search for understanding. It is an expression of purpose and reflects a personal interpretation of the universe.” 

Mildred Thompsn, String Theory Series, 1999, acrylic on vinyl, 61.5 x 46”

Finding her ability to show as a Black woman in the US was hampered by racism and sexism, she spent a decade in Germany. She had studied at Art Academy of Hamburg and returned to live and work in the Rhineland town of Düren in the 60s. By the 70s her work had become completely abstract. From 1975 to 1986 she lived in Tampa, Washington D.C, Paris, before settling in Atlanta, where she wrote for the periodical Art Papers, taught at the Atlanta College of Art and worked as an artist for the rest of her life. Thompson explained, "My work has to do with the cosmos and how it affects us," to Essence magazine in 1990.

Mildred Thompson, Helio Centric III, 1993, intaglio vitreograph, 40" x 30" each
(image size 30" x 24")

 

For me the Helios Centric series evokes the swirling chaos of the nascent solar system, as masses spun in a disc around our sun, colliding and aggregating over time into a string of planets and smaller bodies. She did not make literal interpretations of sound, forces, space or any underlying physics of the universe but expressed these concepts imagination, emotion, colour and rhythm. There's a great deal of joy to be found in her work. She explored the universe from the smallest scales of her Wave Function, Radiation and String Theory series to the astronamical scale of our solar system and beyond and what she saw and expressed was quite beautiful.

Mildred Thompson
Radiation Explorations 8, 1994
Oil on canvas
87.5 x 110.1 inches (222.3 x 279.7 cm) overall

 

Wave Function III, 1993, intaglio vitreograph, 30" x 22.5" (image size 20" x 16")

References & Further Info

MildredThompson.org

Deanna Sirlin, Melissa Messina and the Mildred Thompson Legacy Project, interview on The Arts Section

Mildred Thompson, on Wikipedia.com 

Double laureate Marie Skłodowska-Curie & the hunt for elements

Marie Curie, details of linocut with glow-in-the-dark ink, by Ele Willoughby, 2014

The most well-known woman in the history of physics - or perhaps science - was born almost a century and a half ago today. The famous Polish-born, naturalized-French physicist and chemist Marie Skłodowska-Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was the first woman to win a Nobel prize, the only woman to ever win TWO Nobel prizes, and the only person ever to win in two different sciences: physics and chemistry! Happy birthday Madame Curie! You can read more about her in my post for Ada Lovelace Day, 2014.

Chien-Shung Wu & the Violation of Parity

Madame Wu and the Violation of Parity, 2nd ed. linocut, 2012, Ele Willoughby

Happy birthday to Mme. Wu! Chien-Shiung Wu (May 31, 1912- February 16, 1997, Chinese-born American physicist, whose nicknames included the “First Lady of Physics”, “Chinese Marie Curie,” and “Madame Wu”) came up with a truly beautiful experiment to test whether the weak force conserves parity (whether beta decay would be the same if reflected in the mirror). In my print on the left I show Mme. Wu in her lab and a schematic diagram in the box of her beautiful experiment. On the right I show her reflection, as in the mirror, and in the box I show the mirror reflection of the experimental set-up and the shocking result, that the reaction is not the mirror opposite.

In 1956, theoretical physicists Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang suggested that perhaps the weak force might not be the same 'through the looking-glass'. The idea that the "Law of Conservation of Parity" might be broken was hard to believe. The laws of physics are the same in the mirror for anything else. Face a friend, as in the mirror. If you drop a pencil from your right hand, and your friend mirrors you and drops a pencil with his or her left, the pencils will fall at the same rate. This is because Parity is conserved by the force of gravity - as it is with the electromagnetic force and even the strong (nuclear) force within atomic nuclei. Lee and Yang pointed out that no one had checked to make sure that the weak force, which controls beta decay in radioactive materials, also conserves parity. Lee convinced the brilliant experimentalist to test this.

Madame Wu did a subtle and technically difficult experiment with her collaborators which is shown schematically in the print. She took Cobalt-60 (shown as the cobalt blue sphere in the box), which is radioactive. Its neutrons spontaneously give off electrons and become protons. The electrons are the tiny blue dots. On the left, we see that the Cobalt-60 in an electromagnet (a wire wrapped metal horseshoe with a source of power). Because of the spiral-wrap of the wire, we know that the North pole of the magnet will be on the bottom (you can figure this out by mimicking the curl of the wire with the fingers of your right hand and look at the direction your thumb points). It turns out that the emitted electrons are given off preferentially towards the North pole.

Next, she reversed the set-up as in the mirror. On the right you see the horseshoe and wire spiral reflected. If you use your right hand to check the direction of the magnet field, you'll see that it is the opposite way; the North pole is now on the top. It turns out that the electrons are preferentially emitted upwards toward the North pole. Thus, beta decay IS NOT the same in the mirror! Madame Wu showed that a "Law" of physics did not hold! This result was staggering and shocked the physics world. Lee and Yang won the Nobel prize for their theoretical work. Many physicists thought Mme. Wu should have been included in this win.

She won many honours for her incredible career. Wu took part in the Manhattan Project (she is believed to be the only Chinese person to do so) and literally wrote the book on beta decay. She was the first: Chinese-American to be elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; Female instructor in the Physics Department of Princeton University; Woman with an honorary doctorate from Princeton University; Female President of the American Physical Society, elected in 1975; winner of the Wolf Prize in Physics (1978); Living scientist to have an asteroid named after her. She won many awards and fellowships including: the Research Corporation Award 1958; the Achievement Award, American Association of University Women 1960; John Price Wetherill Medal, The Franklin Institute, 1962; Comstock Prize in Physics, National Academy of Sciences 1964; Chi-Tsin Achievement Award, Chi-Tsin Culture Foundation, Taiwan 1965; Scientist of the Year Award, Industrial Research Magazine 1974; Tom W. Bonner Prize, American Physical Society 1975; National Medal of Science (U.S.) 1975; the aforementioned Wolf Prize in Physics, Israel 1978; Honorary Fellow Royal Society of Edinburgh; Fellow American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science; Fellow American Physical Society. And I bet you hadn't heard of her! I'm trying to redress that.

Making Invisible Fields Visible

Illustration showing movement of air through various rooms,
from Lectures on Ventilation (1869) by Lewis W. Leeds.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

I used to teach physics to arts students and geophysics to environment science students. One of the mathematical concepts which was a challenge to convey was that of the field. In broad terms, it's rather simple really. A field is simply something which is defined at all points in space. A temperature field in a room is a scalar field; that means there is simply a value for temperature, a number you could measure, at any point (distance north from the corner, distance east from the corner and height off the floor) in the room. A vector field is the same thing, but at every point there is an amplitude and a direction. Add a fan or simply ventilation to the room and you can measure airflow at any point; this is a vector field. The illustration gives you an immediate sense of both the temperature and air flow field in a room - illustration as early data visualization.

Berenice Abbott (1898 - 1991) created brilliant
black and white science photographic illustrations like this one

Scifi loves the idea of a force field; this is a vector field descripting a force, like for instance, gravity, at all points in space. You can't see these fields; they are invisible - but they are (hopefully) easy to imagine. You may remember seeing a simple demonstration of magnetic field lines: iron fillings around a bar magnet, tracing out loops from pole to pole. Such a simple experiment is shown - complete with extra electrically conductive metal key - in Berenice Abbott's photo.


Our own Earth has a magnetic field of course, and it is really not that different from that of a bar magnet. Certainly, to first order as physicists say, you can imagine our earth with magnetic field lines from pole to pole tracing loops similar to those in the photo in a full three dimensions. The main complication to this picture is the sun, and way the solar wind intereacts with the Earth's magnetic field.

"Lines of Force and Equipotential Surfaces in a diametral section of a spherical Surface in which the superficial density is a harmonic of the first degree" from A Treatise on Electricity an Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell, 1873

Schematic diagram of how the Sun interacts with the Earth's magnetic
field (curtesy of the USGS). The solar wind distorts the field basically
compacting the field in on the sunward side creating a bowshock and 
blowing a long 'magnetotail' outward on the night side of the Earth.
Geophysicists use the way these fields interact to probe our planet. We
can all enjoy the beauty of the auroras caused by this interaction. Solar 
storms can also interfer with radio communications, damage GPS and 
other satellites, and even cause electrical blackouts. 

I love the creative, eerie and entrancing take of Semiconductor (the duo of Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) take in their short film 'Magnetic Movie'. They let NASA space scientists talk about magnetic field lines, and then animate the Space Science Laboratories at UC Berkeley employing very low frequency radio audio recordings (3 Hz to 30 kHz) as an input for their animated embellishments. They are taking poetic license with reality, but somehow expressing more than we might, if we could literally reveal these invisible fields.


Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

They write,

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons . Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

Perhaps a little more literal, is another artistic work by Semiconductor, which strives to make the invisible geomagnetic field visible. In '20 Hz' they employ data gathered by CARISMA (the Canadian Array for Realtime Investigations of Magnetic Activity, the magnetometer element of the Geospace Observatory Canada project, operated by U of Alberta) of a geomagnetic storm in the Earth's upper atmosphere - data recorded at the frequency of 20 Hertz (of course). They 'play' the data as the audio track and use the data to generate the visuals.


20 Hz from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

They write,

20 Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception.

Ada Lovelace Day 2014: The hard-earned fame of Marie Skłodowska-Curie

Today is the 6th annual international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology, science and math, Ada Lovelace Day 2014 (ALD14). I'm sure you'll all recall, Ada, brilliant proto-software engineer, daughter of absentee father, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, Lord Byron, she was able to describe and conceptualize software for Charles Babbage's computing engine, before the concepts of software, hardware, or even Babbage's own machine existed! She foresaw that computers would be useful for more than mere number-crunching. For this she is rightly recognized as visionary - at least by those of us who know who she was. She figured out how to compute Bernouilli numbers with a Babbage analytical engine. Tragically, she died at only 36. Today, in Ada's name, people around the world are blogging.

(Cross-posted to the minouette blog)

This year I'm participating in an entire group art show celebrating Ada Lovelace Day. The Art.Science.Gallery show Go Ahead and Do It: Portraits of Women in STEM culminates today! I will share all of my portraits of women in science (and links to where I tell their stories) below.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie, linocut with glow-in-the-dark ink by Ele Willoughby, 2014

In previous years, I've specifically avoided writing about Marie Curie because she is often the one historical figure people can name. I don't like to do the obvious thing and particularly want to highlight the under appreciated heroines of science. However the result is that her truly remarkable achievements haven't been celebrated here, just because of her fame. So, with a collection of portraits and stories written on the less well known, today I'll write about the well-known and why she in fact deserves her fame.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), Polish-born, naturalized-French physicist and chemist, as the first woman to win a Nobel prize, the only woman to ever win TWO Nobel prizes, and the only person ever to win in two different sciences: physics and chemistry! She was also the first female professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris. Born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw, she studied secretly at the Floating University there before moving to Paris where she earned higher scientific degrees, met her PhD supervisor and future husband Pierre.

She was one of the pioneers who helped explain radioactivity, a term she coined. She was the one who first developed a means of isolating radioacitve isotopes and discovered not one, but two new elements: polonium (named for her native country) and radium. She also pioneered radioactive medicine, proposing the treatment of tumors with radioactivity. She founded medical research centres, the Curie Institutes in Paris and Warsaw which are still active today. She created the first field radiology centres during World War I. Each one of these achievements alone would warrant being memorialized in the annals of science and medicine; she did all of these things. She died in 1934 from aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation, including carrying test tubes of radium in her pockets during research and her World War I service in her mobile X-ray units.

Her pioneering work explaining radioactivity earned her the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with physicist Henri Becquerel. At first, the Committee intended to honour only Pierre and Becquerel, but Swedish mathematician Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, an advocate of women in science, alerted Pierre to the situation. (You may recall that it was the same man who helped Sofia Kovalevski secure a University position in Stockholm and that she collaborated on works of literature and had what was called a "romantic friendship" with his sister Duchess Anne-Charlotte Edgren-Leffler).  After Pierre's complaint, Marie's name was added to the nomination. The 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to her "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element."

Her life and legacy are truly extraordinary!

Marie Skłodowska-Curie, linocut with glow-in-the-dark ink show in the light and dark by Ele Willoughby, 2014

Not only was her work original and providing revolutionary insight on the theoretical side at the time, but the sheer heroic dedication and labour involved in her experimental work cannot be overstated. Having recognized that pitchblende ore must contain multiple elements which were giving off radiation, she and Pierre were able to show in 1898 that two new elements Polonium and Radium were needed to explain their observations. They then sought to actually isolate these elements. From a ton of pitchblende, she separated one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride in 1902. In 1910 Marie Curie isolated pure radium metal - a full 12 years after she and Pierre published their preliminary evidence for its existence. This involved working in a shed, meticulously separating the radioactive material from the inert and then dividing the radioactive material into its various sources for many years - all the while raising their young daughter when not at the lab.

Both of the elements she discovered are radioactive, meaning that they spontaneously give off radiation. All of the isotopes of polonium emit alpha particles, but Polonium-210 will emit a blue glow which is caused by excitation of surrounding air. Radium emits alpha, beta and gamma particles - that is 2 protons and 2 neutrons, electrons as well as x-rays. Thus, I've shown her sample surrounded by the symbols of these particles: the straight and wiggly lined arrows for the massive particles and high-energy light photons or gamma rays respectively, and made the sample with glow-in-the-dark ink. While the materials she discovered and worked with would have glowed due to radioactivity, never fear... these prints glow due to phosphorescence - a different process which is not dangerous. The ink will absorb UV light (for instance, from sunlight) and re-emit it in the dark.

The linocut is printed on Japanese kozo paper 9.25" by 12.5" (23.5 cm by 32 cm) in an edition of eight.

You can also find my complete set of women in STEM portraits here.

Inspired by Science

Inspired by Science on The Etsy Blog

The Etsy blog just posted Karen Brown's article featuring 5 Etsy artists who are inspired by science, including me!

Lise Meitner and Nuclear Fission Linocut History of Physics by minouette

 

“I think the idea that art and science are separate is unfounded,” says print maker Ele Willoughby of minouette. “It takes creativity to be a good scientist and experimentation to be a good artist.” In her Etsy shop, Ele explores art and science through a series of portraits of scientists inspired by the bi-monthly challenges of the Mad Scientists of Etsy team. “I love hearing from parents who want to inspire young children with portraits of scientific heroes or heroines,” she says.

There are some fabulous artists in that inspiring intersection of art and science, and several of my prints included.


(x-posted to the on-going saga of minouette)

Quantum Mechanical Art

  Richard Feynman, & Feynman diagrams,  by Hannah Wilson

Quantum mechanics is the physics of the very small, the subatomic. On that scale classical physics we know intuitively, the physics of our everyday life and human-sized things, breaks down. Strange things can happen; objects (or wave-particles at least) can go through walls or seem to go through two different French doors at the same time. We can't investigate this world without literally interfering with it. We can only know something's position or momentum precisely; it's either where or how fast, but not both. We can only meaningfully make predictions about groups of things: half of these radioactive nuclei will decay in one half-life; the electrons going through these two slits will make this specific interference pattern, but don't ask me to explain what any individual electron will do, and so forth. This sort of anti-intuitive arena inspires either purely mathematical and probabilistic or very metaphorical descriptions. Some things are unknowable, based on the fundamental laws of physics. Working in this Wonderland and believing seven impossible things before breakfast can inspire creativity and often visual thinking in physicists. This weird world within is also a source of inspiration to visual artists.

Edward Tufte, All Possible Photons

One of the most amazing and distinctly visual tools in the quantum mechanic's tool box is the Feynman diagram. These elegant schematics of lines and assorted squiggles not only depict the sorts of things which can occur in any given interaction in the quantum world, they actually allow us to calculate probabilities; they actually represent and take the place of complex equations - and believe you me are far easier to work with.  Everyone would rather draw a series of little drawings than calculate probability amplitudes by integrating over many variables. They are quite easy to read, once you know the vocabulary of particles, antiparticles, force carriers - real and virtual - and they can describe everything which can occur in the quantum world. It's perhaps no surprise that preeminent information designer and champion of elegance, simplicity and meaning in scientific graphics, Edward Tufte would be inspired to creature sculptures of Feynman diagrams with stainless steel tubing.

Richard Feynman, Equations and Sketches, 1985

Feynman himself of course had an artistic side. It is well-known that he played the bongos, or painted some of his own diagrams on his van. You may have heard his 'Ode to a flower' - a beautiful refutation of the bias that beauty is to only be found in art, and it is lost on science. The short monologue is animated by Fraser Davison below.  He himself started to draw, at age 44, shortly after developing his visual language for quantum mechanics (via Brain Pickings). He traded art for science lessons with his friend the doubter that scientists could see the beauty of a flower. His daughter Michelle even gathered his drawings into a short book The Art of Richard P. Feynman: Images by a Curious Character. 


Richard Feynman - Ode To A Flower from Fraser Davidson on Vimeo.

Oliver Jeffers, 'Still life with light and lightbulb'

Painter and illustrator Oliver Jeffers got inspired by quantum mechanics, and wave-particle duality. As he himself explains below, we find that if you set up and experiment to look for a wave, light (and in fact electrons, or other quantum wave/particles) will behave like a wave; whereas, if you set up an experiment to look for a particle light (and other wavicles) will behave like a particle.  His painting 'Still life with light and lightbulb' includes the de Broglie equation, relating wavelength to momentum of anything! (So particles, with mass and momentum have wavelengths, and photons which can seem like waves have momentum like particles).

Julian Voss-Andreae, The Well (Quantum Corral), 2009
Gilded wood, 3” x 13” x 12” x (6 x 34 x 31 cm)

Julian Voss-Andreae is a sculptor who also pursued graduate research in quantum mechanics. His background comes out in his sculptures of 'Quantum Objects' and molecular structures. A quantum coral is  a a ring of atoms arranged in an arbitrary shape on a substrate. Lutz, Eigler and Crommie (1993), for instance used a ring of iron (which is ferromagnetic) atoms on copper to reflect the surface electrons into a predicted wave pattern - 'coralling' them into the 'fence' of iron. Voss-Andreae used their specific data to create his sculpture The Well (as in a quantum mechanical well or potential energy well in which electrons are trapped). Like any wavicle, the nature of his 'Quantum Man' sculpture depends on how you look at it, appearing quite solid or nearly disappearing altogether. He also makes beautiful sculptures of structures right at the classic/quantum interface... where the weird world of the very small gets to sufficiently large molecular structures to obey the physics of our everyday world, like 'Quantum Buckeyball' and the many complex protein molecules. His graduate work incidentally, showed that single object as large as Carbon-60, a Buckyball, would behave like a wave, going through two slits at once (just like electrons in the famous double slit experiment).

Julian Voss-Andreae, Quantum Man

Julian Voss-Andreae, Quantum Buckeyball

Ele Willoughby, Niels Bohr, 2010

My own artwork on the subject of quantum mechanics is a little less literal perhaps... though my linocut portrait of Niels Bohr includes the Bohr model explanation of the Balmer series - the spectral lines given off by excited hydrogen which are in the visible range, showing Bohr's electron orbits (which we now know are a bit too simplistic a model) at the right ratio of diameters, and photons (shown as wavy lines, following Feynman's convention) given off as an electron falls from one given orbit to another lower energy state in the appropriate colours. The line spectrum you would see, if you spread the light given off with a prism, is shown below. I've also depicted Schrödinger's cat, one of the most famous thought experiments (or, really metaphors for the weirdness of quantum mechanics). Erwin Schrödinger proposed this hypothetical experiment to link the strangeness of the quantum world to our everyday world of big things like cats. He imagined a cat in a box with a vial of lethal poison which would rupture if and only if a radioactive particle had decayed - an individually unpredictable quantum event. Until you open the box, is the cat dead or alive? According to quantum mechanics, the wavefunction (or equation describing its state) is the superposition of that of dead and live cat... that is, equal parts live and dead... which of course, seems absurd. Whether the cat is alive or dead depends on when you look at it. Hence, I made a cat and poison vial in thermochromic temperature-dependant ink; sometimes they are apparent, sometimes they are not (or at least, it's too warm and they turn colourless).

Ele Willoughby, Schrödinger's Cat (coloured state), 2011

Ele Willoughby, Schrödinger's Cat (colourless state)