Sol-Monath is for Science Cakes

Celestial Cephalopod Created by Corinna Maguire for the Threadcakes Competition

I learned from the Wellcome Collection (a museum which aims to share "science, medicine, life and art") that February was once the month of cakes.

The Anglo-Saxon name for February was Sol-Monath which roughly means 'the month of cakes'. BRING BACK THE PAST NOW! pic.twitter.com/8sco87xU1G

— Wellcome Collection (@ExploreWellcome) February 1, 2019

so let's talk about cakes as science-art and science communication shall we?

ATLAS detector cake (credit: Katharine Leney via Symmetry)

Universe cake (credit: David Morse and Katharine Leney via Symmetry)

Particle physicists Katy Grimm and Katharine Leney who work on the ATLAS collaboration at CERN, discovered they also share a mutual love of baking. Symmetry magazine covers their delightful cakes (and other baked goods) which do everything from directly illustrating the ATLAS particle detector, to equations, diagrams and other data visualizations to metaphorically communicating the structure of protons according to the Standard Model or communicating through the medium of the cosmos cake, the proportions of regular matter, dark matter and dark energy. You'll find more via PhysicsCakes on Twitter.

In the wonderful world of science cakes, Earth and planetary science and amazingly well represented. Australian zoologist Rhiannon has posted several wonderful examples, including tutorials for nested spherical cakes on her blog Cakecrumbs.

This wonder Earth cake shows oceans and continents on the blue icing layer, orange mantle and yellow inner and outer core layers. (via Cakecrumbs)

The beautiful Jupiter cake likewise has three concentric layers to represent rocky and icy core, a middle liquid metal hydrogen layer and an outer molecular hydrogen layer. She says the famous giant anticyclone storm, the Great Red Spot was what attracted her. She recreated the patterns in the atmosphere with "ivory marshmallow fondant, then dry brushing a combination of ivory, brown and maroon edible ink." (via Cakecrumbs)

You can find space cakes bedecked or embedded with the planets of the solar system! Consider this tutorial for Mirror Glaze Galaxy Cake from the Also the Crumbs Please blog, the Astronomy themed groom's cake or the award-winning portrait of Galileo Galilei!

Astronomy-themed groom's cake shot by Laurel McConnell

Mirror Glaze Galaxy Cake from the Also the Crumbs Please

Galileo cake, winner of the Birmingham’s Cake International gold medal in the international class.

The mirror glaze is also just the thing for anyone creating cakes representing marble, many minerals or geode cakes. Geodes in fact, have been a real trend in wedding cakes and there is an astonishing array of geode inspired cakes in every imaginable colours.

Mirror glaze cake with recipe from Musely

Boho geode wedding cake by Cake Life Bake Shop | Photo by Hope Helmuth

Geode cake via You and Your Wedding

Natural history cakes don't stop with mineral specimens! Flora and fauna are popular too. There's a long history of using actual edible flowers, or sculpting flowers or leaves, often cast directly from actual plants - but those that convincingly recreate lifeforms with cake, icing, chocolate, fondant and other edibles are my favourites.

Lifelike deer cake by legendary Grand Dame of the cake decorating world, Sylvia Weinstock

This beauty hits on both natural history and the history of science as it's inspired by the hyper-realistic botanical still-life paintings of Dutch artist Rachel Ruysch (1685 to 1750). This cake is deocrated with custom-made sugar flowers, created by Amy DeGiulio of Sugar Flower Cake Shop in New York City, and placed in a gold urn to complete the look. (via Martha Stewart Weddings)

Tasmanian Masked Owl cake from Cakecrumbs

Albino Burmese Python Snake cake by by Francesca Pitcher from North Star Cakes

Jakarta-based pastry chef Iven Kawi who runs the Iven Oven where she makes these wonderful terrarium inspired cakes which hit the succulent trend (via Colossal)

My son requested a dinosaur-shaped cake, capped with a Cretaceous scene with volcano and smaller dinosaurs for his 5th birthday, so I assure you, this is but a tiny peek at what is out there. I haven't even touched on paleontological cakes, or the gothic world of anatomy cakes. There's a whole world of yummy cake-based science art/communication out there for you to explore and, better yet, eat.

(Hat-tip to my friend Faunalia, who has been sharing images of amazing cakes with me for years! You can find some of our favourite images here.).

Inge Lehmann & the Earth's Solid Inner Core

Inge Lehmann, linocut, 8" x 8", by Ele Willoughby, 2011

Happy birthday to Inge Lehmann! Inge Lehmann (May 13, 1888 – February 21, 1993) was a Danish seismologist who first demonstrated that the Earth's core is not one single molten sphere, but contained an inner (solid) core, in 1936. She was a pioneer woman in science, a brilliant seismologist and lived to be 105, so I've selected her for my offering for the Mad Scientists of Etsy April challenge on earthquake seismology. Each is 8" (20.5 cm) square and printed in dark cyan and red-orange ink on white Japanese kozo (mulberry) paper.

We now know, as she first postulated, that the earth has roughly three equal concentric sections: mantle, liquid outer core and solid inner core. The crust, on which we live is merely a thin, um, scum really, on top of this slowly boiling pot. The only way to probe deep into the earth's core is to employ massive earthquakes, the waves they generate and the paths they follow. There are two main types of seismic waves used for studies of the globe, unimaginatively named Primary (or P, or compressional) and Secondary (or S, or shear). Imagine a glass of water with a straw; the straw will appear broken at the air-water interface, because light bends as it enters the water. Just like light travelling through different media, these seismic waves can bend, reflect or be transmitted at any boundary. The difference in physical properties between the mantle and outer core causes a P-wave shadow. (For S-waves, the shadow zone is absolute because liquids, like the outer core, do not support shear - imagine trying to cut water with a pair of shears and you can see this for yourself. Thus, no shear waves can make it through the outer core, and thus we can be certain the outer core is fluid). That means, the compressional waves from an earthquake can be recorded at seismic stations out to 105 degrees from an epicentre and then there is a zone which is in the core's shadow. Lehmann found that there were some late-arriving P-waves are much larger angles (142 to 180 degrees) which had been vaguely labelled 'diffractions'. She showed that these could be explained instead by deflections of the waves which travelled through the outer core at her postulated inner core boundary.

She later discovered a discontinuity in the mantle (confusingly also called the Lehmann discontinuity). She did important work well into her 70s.

When she received the Bowie medal in 1971 (she was the first woman to receive the highest honour of the American Geophysical Union), her citation noted that the "Lehmann discontinuity was discovered through exacting scrutiny of seismic records by a master of a black art for which no amount of computerization is likely to be a complete substitute...".

I think her accomplishment is downright astonishing. To have the exactitude to work with the data and the daring to neglect the irrelevant and offer up a simple, elegant - correct! - explanation is a rare and marvellous thing. To be the top of her field in 1936, when she was a pioneer for women in science and had to compete in vain with incompetent men (her words) is heroic.

I based my portrait on an earlier photo, to match the date of her phenomenal P' paper. I also show her model of the earth in red-orange ink, complete with mantle, inner and outer core, and travel paths for rays through the layers, including into the shadow zone.

Earth Sci Animation

This is a very simple post, but I really must share this great little animation. I am after all, a geophysicist by training, and this elegant animation “Everything You Need to Know About Planet Earth” by Munich-based Kurzgesagt, covers much of a first year physics of the Earth course in a lucid, fun, succinct way, with a great minimalist aesthetic, and a few extra dinosaurs.



Their rapid summary of plate tectonics does leave out mid-ocean ridges, transform faults, collision zones and more... but in fairness, an entire plate tectonics future video is promised. Way to go Kurzgesagt!

(via Laughing Squid)

Singing about Isostsy, with Stop-Motion and the Baltic Sea

(↬Colossal)

This lovely short stop-motion paper craft video is directed by Vincent Pianina and Lorenzo Papace (May 2012) for Papace's band Ödland, for the song Østersøen on the album Sankta Lucia (October 2011). The music was also written, composed and recorded by Lorenzo Papace. The song tells the story, in French, of dreaming of traveling in bed, moving about a room, aboard a train, which in turn is aboard a ship, which is sailing the Baltic Sea, trying to avoid dangerous islands.

There is a verse about isostacy, which has got to be the most only artistic interpretation of the geophysical concept I've ever seen. It's quite pertinent to the Baltic, due to the post-glacial rebound (or isotatic rebound) of Fennoscandia¹ to the north and east of the sea; basically, the nature and size of the sea depends on its relative height. Imagine all the continents floating on the Earth's mantle (also shown in the video), much like icebergs float in the sea, with a certain proportion above water and the remainder below. Everything will find its equilibrium position. If you drop an ice cube in your glass of water, it may sink initially then float to the surface; isostasy (or with fluids, buoyancy) will push the less dense up so that it can be in gravitational equilibrium. In the case of icebergs, which are only slightly less dense than water, there is 90% below the sea and only 10% above. It is isostasy which determines these proportions, as the song says (the islands like icebergs find the sea surface through the process of isostasy). Thus mountains have 'roots' just like icebergs hide much below the waterline. If you put a large weight on the Earth, it will deform to accommodate this weight like a trampoline. Consider for instance huge glacial ice sheets during ice ages. These pushed the crust downward. Since the removal of that weight and the retreat of the icesheets, the Earth has been rebounding upward to find its new icesheet-less equilibrium. (The Earth, like SillyPutty, is viscoelastic, so it does not respond instantaneously to the removal of the icesheet's mass, but on a longer time scale governed by the nature of the mantle - specifically its viscosity. It's also important to remember that if we think in geological time, units of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years are not that long). Thus vast regions of the Earth near the poles, like Fennoscandia, or Canada's Hudson's Bay are in fact moving and have been moving upward, away from the centre of the planet, since the retreat of the glaciers and the end of the last ice age. In the song, which describes a dream, the process is vastly sped up, and "dangerous islands" pop up through isostasy in a matter of seconds, so the boat must take a circumambulating path to navigate its changing seascape.

Consider the series of shapes needed to show the rise of a single island!

The video uses the plates of Ernst Haeckel² to great effect. I love the spatial context; the bed upon the train upon the ship upon the sea, complete with the multifarious sea life; the sea in turn is shown in context of Northern Europe and earth and the solar system. In the process they built a wonderful orrery (solar system model). How I love orreries. The train furthermore travels an amazing roller coaster-like track, which I'm astounded to learn they built and filmed in only 4 months. It's really quite marvellous.

You can find more about the music, the video, art and process on the blog Le Petit Écho Malade. You can even buy the sheet music. I'm so charmed by this quixotic, anachronistic endeavour. Check it out.

1 Ok, I just wanted to use the word 'Fennoscandia'. It is the geological province which encompasses the entire Scandinavian peninsula and Finnland.

2 You know how I am a raving fan of the wunderkammer collections of nature illustration by Ernst Haeckel.

Pareidolia Tamed

I strive to be a Renaissance woman, to straddle the art:science divide. I have some success in this. For instance, people actually pay me to work as a scientist, and other people pay me to make art. I also, make 'art about science' sometimes. In observing myself, I find that I come to art about science as a scientist - I might employ whimsy, but I respect accuracy. This tendency doesn't stop me from making art about myth. But the way my brain is wired, I don't have any tendency to use science decoratively, or twist it for humour. If there is humour, it is inherent (like the irony in scientists having imaginary friends such as Maxwell's Demon). This is not a judgment, merely an observation. I enjoy art which combines levity with science.

As a scientist, I am trained to be wary of 'apophenia' or the propensity to see patterns where there are none, and specifically 'pareidolia' or seeing images in random stimuli, like seeing a dragon in the clouds. Pareidolia can be very useful as a visual artist. To the scientist it is a hazard, unless it recognized and happens to inspire ideas (as it often does to the artist). I think this training is why, I recognize in Kevin Van Aelst an artist with similar interests to me, but a mind which works quite differently than my own. His photographs show things masquerading as other things, often with a scientific or mathematical bent. (His C.V. says his background is psychology- perhaps this explains the lens through which he views his subjects.)

Consider what appears at first glance to be a pile of laundry, but on closer examination reveals a lesson in anatomy, complete with colours to indicate the nature of the blood (blue, deoxygenated vs. oxygenated red) in cardiovascular circulation:

The Heart, 2009, digital c-print, 40 x 30"

Or the fractal egg (with yolks illustrating the Cantor set), as if he sensed that a yolk was simply the first in a set to be subdivided. A pattern, which is not really there...


Or the more straightforward, map of Hawaii.

Hawaii, 2007, digital C-print, 12 x 18

But to me, this seemingly simple case of pareidolia, seeing a map in a spilled drink, hides a deeper insight. As a geophysicist, I know that the man in the painting behind my shoulder, J. Tuzo Wilson explained that the Hawaiian islands were formed by upwelling molten rock at a fixed hotspot, as the Pacific tectonic plate moved northwest leaving a trail of volcanoes in its wake. Physics tells you inertial frames of reference are equivalent; we could sit on the hotspot for hundreds of million of years (ouch!) and watch the Pacific plate go by, or affix ourselves to the Pacific and watch the volcanoes appear in a line in the opposite direction. Suddenly, the spilled pop seems like a nice metaphor for island chain formation.

Some of his portfolio is just that: metaphors in unexpected media. Like cellular mitosis in doughnuts, complete with sprinkle chromosomes:

Cellular Mitosis (krispy kreme), 2005, series of 6 c-prints, each 16 x 20

Or clouds nomenclature in a coffee cup:

Common Clouds, 2007, Series of 9 digital C-prints and labels, each print: 16 x 20

But metaphor is also both a hazard (because it can lead to inaccuracy) and an invaluable tool (because it can lead to insight) to the scientist. Ultimately, the scientist and the artist share communication as a paramount goal. As such the place where they intersect is an area rife with possibility and creativity - and often humour.