Cubism. Realism. Sciencism.

Post-impressionist carcinoma.

This week's post from me will be relatively brief as I am currently on honeymoon, and although Shaun somehow manages to find time on his travels to blog about his conference experiences I doubt my new wife would be too happy if I did likewise! So, in lieu of my intended Human Machine series post (which will be coming early in the new year), I wanted to bring your attention to something wonderful going on at the Cell Picture Show.

The Cell Picture Show has appeared in the Trenches before (here and here), but this recent instalment is to me even more original and interesting than anything they've had before. The image above has two halves, both of which are strikingly reminiscent of Van Gogh's famous and beautiful Starry Night. They look like the product of some brilliant mind with an extraordinary mastery of colour and texture. In fact, the image on the left is a cross section of mouse skin containing basal skin carcinoma, with various components stained different colours and imaged using a fluorescence microscope. The image on the right is an artist's rendering of the same image using different coloured fabrics stitched together. This is part of Cell's exhibition 'Art Under the Microscope', in which images of biological samples are recreated into works of art by professional artists. The image above is just one example, but there are many others of similar standard available in the exhibition. The technical prowess of the researchers who obtained the original images is impressive, as are the aesthetic abilities of the artists who recreated them.

A fire-like network of neural stem cells in the human brain (left) and their artistic equivalent (right).

What I find so exciting about this exhibition is that it is redefining what can be the subject of art, and what can be the source of artistic inspiration. Nature has been inspiring artists for thousands of years, why should that be restricted to what we can see with our own eyes? We are now at a level of technology that we can begin to unveil many of the secrets that nature had previously been hiding from art. This should be exciting to both scientists and artists. Artists can be excited by the wealth of new subject matter that is beginning to open up to them, and scientists can be excited by the prospect of art adding to the ever-growing popularity and appreciation of science. Perhaps one day there will be great debates in artistic circles about new avant-garde artists who paint their proteins in a controversial way, much like the debates between the surrealists and romanticists on how to depict more macroscopic areas of nature. 

Although 'Art Under the Microscope' is a small exhibition, it nonetheless marks a growing trend in the use of science as inspiration for art. I sincerely hope that this continues as it will enrich both science and art, and help to blur the boundaries between them. Art has been very successful in entering many concious aspects of our daily lives, and we are the better for it. Science is still catching up in many regards, although to be fair it hasn't had all that long to make up the difference. If science were as exposed in the public conciousness and as everyday as art is, then I believe we would benefit similarly as we have from the ubiquity of art. The fusion of the two is a match made in heaven that is finally beginning to take hold. I look forward to the days when parks are adorned with pieces of science-based public art, and the spectrum of human endeavour is appreciated as single entity rather than as the separated, delineated pigeon holes of 'art' and 'science' as discrete subjects.

TEDx CERN

If you live in Helsinki come to our live webcast of the event. We will feed you.

I had intended to write today's post on anomalies in cosmology. Unfortunately, I have suffered a crisis of confidence and have decided to postpone such a post for the future. I now have both a bunch of notes on the topic, left over from the Planck conference and a half-written post, left over from the weekend. The topic is a bit controversial and when I publish some thoughts on it I want to be very careful and precise so as not to accidentally annoy anyone.

Instead, I will tell you quickly about a really cool event that is taking place this Friday.

CERN is hosting a TED-x event. What is that? Well, a TED-x event is similar to a TED event, except that it isn't organised by TED itself. It is only endorsed by TED. What is TED? OK, well, TED is an organisation that organises a set of conferences around the world. The theme of the conferences is "ideas worth spreading" and speakers are given quite short time slots (typically less then twenty minutes) to express these ideas. Consequently the talks are often very fascinating as the speakers are forced to only say what really matters, leaving all the superfluous details aside. At the main TED events the speakers are also almost universally very good at giving talks, so the quality is high.

George Smoot, the host of the webcast/show. He has also been awarded one of the most illustrious honours any scientist can, a Nobel Prize guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory.

In fact, the TED realm of YouTube is one of the most dangerous black-holes of procrastination you can find. The shortness of the talks, combined with how interesting and intellectually stimulating they are is like the perfect storm of procrastination conditions. They don't last long enough for you to think that watching just one more is a problem. They are interesting, so you don't get bored. And they stimulate your mind so you don't even feel like you're using your time poorly (always my biggest procrastination danger). Then, half the day has gone.

Anyway, I have been making an analogy between science and sports in my mind for a long time now, and first wrote about it here more than a year ago. I really think that there is the potential for fundamental research to be as popular in today's society as sports is. Seriously! You might wonder why, if this is true, science isn't as popular as sports. Football matches fill out arenas and tennis players earn millions each year, entirely from the private sector throwing money at them to do nothing that is even remotely productive, yet even the highest profile fundamental research event of 2012, the discovery of the Higgs particle, was only front page news for a day.

A three dimensional fractal in 3D

The video below is a fractal. It is also three dimensional. It has also been rendered from two different locations very close to each other. Therefore, you can also see it in three dimensions.

If you're not used to using YouTube's 3d capabilities then don't worry, this guy has a tutorial video explaining how to see the full three-dimensionality of the video without the need for glasses. It's just like magic eye in reverse, basically (though I'm not sure how good it is for your eye muscles).

If you liked that you should read the description of how the Mandelbulb was discovered. The Mandelbulb was made by people looking for a three dimensional analogue of the well known Mandelbrot set. If you don't know what the Mandelbrot set is, first watch this video, then read about what you just saw at Wikipedia.

None of the Mandelbulb, or the Mandelbrot set or the 3d fractal (a Mandelbox) shown above were designed by a human mind. All of the complexity found in the images comes about from defining structures in two or three dimensional space as the set of points that are or are not solutions to relatively simple mathematical algorithms. For example, the algorithm describing the Mandelbrot set can be described in just one line:

"... the Mandelbrot set is the set of values of c in the complex plane for which the orbit of 0 under iteration of the complex quadratic polynomial \(z_{n+1} = z_n^2 + c\) remains bounded".

All of the complexity you can see in the entire ten minutes of the Mandelbrot set video I linked to above is defined in that one simple sentence.

Twitter: @just_shaun

Cinema verité - biology style

Animations of scientific principles are becoming more and more popular as a way of condensing complex data into an easily accessible format, particularly in the field of biology. Nonetheless, a recent article in Nature has raised a number of interesting points about how the visualisation of biological processes should not be taken lightly. Biology is unnervingly complex and there is still much that we don't understand - how are we to know how much of an animation is based on actual data and how much is just 'filling in the gaps'? This is not limited to the layperson - humans are very visual creatures and we are more easily swayed by pictures than words, experts are no exception. This is not new, journals have included idealised representations of biological processes for decades, but the advancement in computer animation has opened the door for more sophisticated animations that may imply a more thorough understanding where one does not exist. 

That said, I don't believe that researchers actively seek to mislead when presenting their findings in animated form, rather that they have to take the necessary steps to complete the movie - inherently requiring some artistic licence. And, for the most part, the bits being filled in are done so with reasonable scientific assumptions in mind and are not wild fantasy. The medium is an exciting one, and one that will hopefully play a significant role in not only disseminating scientific understanding, but also help to further research by highlighting gaps in our understanding. We must, however, always be vigilant when interpreting these animations as they are exactly that - animations - and not actual footage of molecular biology.

An excellent example of biological animation is the 'Inner Life of a Cell' video by a group in Harvard. I love this video, which depicts the events that occur upon the activation of T cell, and is pretty accurate in that almost everything show is backed up by real evidence. The 'motor protein' kinesin at 3:40 is particularly impressive because its mechanism of 'walking' along microtubules is backed up by extensive structural and biochemical studies, yet it just looks so much like a drunk guy who's been pulled over by the police and is trying to walk in a straight line! If you get the chance, I really recommend watching the video and reading the article mentioned above. Enjoy!

Science and Video Games

A long time ago I posted about an online game called FoldIt. After I made that post various other examples of crossovers between video games and science have been brought to my attention. Many of these, I have linked to from The Trenches of Discovery's Facebook and Google+ pages and some I've been saving for a rainy day. (Note, we often post links/comments to those pages when we don't consider them worth a whole blog post. If you read this blog, but aren't following either of those pages, you're missing out on some interesting stuff. You should remedy this.)

Well, it isn't rainy, but it is foggy, so the day has as good as come. What follows is a run through of some of the various science/video game crossovers I'm aware of. Some of these are neat video games, designed to either teach an aspect of science, or  try to give a phenomenological experience of what that aspect of science means for the world. Others are more like FoldIt, they are puzzle games that you try to solve, and in the process you're actually helping the scientists solve their research problems.

Phylo

Symphony of Science - Climate Change

Some of you may already be familiar with the 'Symphony of Science' YouTube series, but I thought I'd give it a plug here anyway. These are a collection of videos created from various documentaries and science programmes spliced together and auto-tuned to make a song on a specific area of science. I'll be honest, the 'song' aspect of it is not the greatest musical contribution that mankind's ever seen, but I still really like these videos because they encapsulate an entire idea in a way that is so commonly used to express other concepts but is so rarely applied to science. The topics covered range from evolution, to space travel, to quantum mechanics, and are all well worth a watch. 

In recent years I've felt a slowly increasing passion among the general population (in the UK, at least)  for good scientific broadcasting and innovative ways to present scientific principles. This is exemplified by the notoriety of a number of 'popular' scientists, such as Brian Cox or David Attenborough, and the fact that several celebrities that started out in general entertainment have now moved in the direction of scientific broadcasting, Dara O Briain and James May to name but two. Perhaps we here on this sceptred isle have been spoiled by the exemplary science programmes regularly released by the BBC, but I believe that innovative presentations of science have the capability to connect with people regardless of nationality. The Symphony of Science is just one such presentation and, even if it's not your cup of tea, it is undoubtedly innovative.

The latest installation in the series was released this week and covers the ever-topical issue of climate change. 

Pushing back the boundaries

The Red Planet?

The adventure of NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover took an exciting step forward today as the pioneering little machine vaporised its first rock with its cheerfully named 'ChemCam' laser. The Curiosity mission has tapped into a huge vein of public enthusiasm for investigation and the exploration of the unknown, exemplified by the fact that over a thousand people gathered in New York's Times Square to watch the live landing. Space exploration has often occupied a romantic place in the heart of public opinion, in part because of the wonderful images that can be beamed back, which can offer a more personal connection to the work being done and give people a greater sense of ownership over scientific endeavour. The Curiosity mission is no exception - NASA is dutifully publishing the images being sent back from Mars to the delight of those of us on Earth.

The potential for images to capture the public imagination has not gone unnoticed by other branches of science. Last year I published a post about the Cell Picture Show, a project by the biology journal Cell to highlight the most striking images emerging from the ever expanding field of biological microscopy. In this post I wanted to highlight a recent edition to the project: the super-resolution gallery.

Super-resoltion is a fairly recent step forward in microscopy that allows biologists to observe life's molecular events on an unprecedentedly small scale using a range of cunning technical tricks. Researchers can now follow individual molecules as they move across the surface of a cell, or observe the machinery of processes like DNA replication in fine detail. Just like Curiosity, the missions of super-resolution are pushing back the frontiers of knowledge and exploring the unknown; not going further, but looking smaller. I would definitely recommend giving this new gallery a look: here.  

Image is property of Cell and National Institute of Health - microtubules imaged by conventional (right) and super-resolution (left) microscopy within a Drosophila cell.

The phenomenology of a fourth spatial dimension.

A hyperdimensional cube, known as a tesseract...

Part of the motivation for this blog was to open up a dialogue between working artists and working scientists. One of the conversations that is starting to develop relates to the (artistic) field of phenomenology and whether it does/doesn't have anything to say when it comes to the more abstruse sciences. Of course phenomenology is the study of the things humans experience (at least according to my rudimentary understanding of it) and scientists are human beings who experience abstruse science so phenomenology must have something to say about science, by definition. But what?

The discussions which began this conversation concerned two online applications that aid in the visualisation of the scales involved in time and space. See this post and this post and the comments in each for a discussion of the apps. In that discussion and in the comments to a later post I expressed a sense of disappointment in what these apps were managing to express. I should clarify that I think the apps are great and interesting, but if one is looking for a phenomenology of science I don't think this is where the most interesting phenomenology is (of course the app creators aren't looking for a phenomenology of science, so they are completely forgiven). The scale of space and time are very ordinary, everyday, Earthly things. The most interesting discoveries science has made, at least in the world of high energy physics, are not well described in such terms - this is almost precisely what makes them so interesting.

As Rhys pointed out in one of those comment threads a huge part of this problem is that many of these discoveries rely heavily on mathematics. And, to a very large degree, to understand the discoveries, you need to have a grasp of the maths. The fact that the very abstract structures and symmetries and patterns that lie hidden in the mathematics are then actually exhibited in the real universe is one of the more wonderful things experienced by a scientist. And that is not easily captured simply through pictures, videos and sounds (or even smells) of the universe.

However, I came across an app today that really does try to bridge this gap. If someone were to be looking for a true phenomenology of the more interesting and wonder inducing aspects of theoretical physics then this is the sort of thing one should be looking for. It is an app that simulates a hyper-dimensional cube. OK, so what on Earth does that mean?

Well, a dot exists in zero dimensions, it has no length, width, nothing. A line exists in one dimension, it has simply a length. A square exists in two dimensions, it has a length and a width. Next, a cube, exists in three dimensions, it has a length, a width and a depth. Now, just imagine there was a fourth spatial dimension. Mathematically this is an easy thing to write down. Then, just as one can form a cube by extending a square into a third dimension, one can form something known as a tesseract by extending a cube into a fourth spatial dimension.

Now, we creatures who exist in just three spatial dimension can't visualise a fourth spatial dimension (I certainly can't). But, just as we can look at a two dimensional surface (a TV screen) and see a projection of a three dimensional object, so can we do the same for an imagined four dimensional object projected onto three (or two) dimensions. And this is precisely what this app does for a four dimensional tesseract. [Edit: Or, as Rhys said in this comment "it shows what a 4D painter would paint on a 3D canvas..."]. And the brilliance is that the app even allows you to manipulate the tesseract, to move it, to spin it (in any of the four dimensions) and while manipulating it you see how that three dimensional projection changes on your two dimensional screen. Here's a video preview...

This app came to my attention as a consequence of minutephysics covering extra spatial dimensions in his latest video - which you should watch for a quick overview of higher dimension. There is even, apparently, a game in construction that requires you to move into and around a fourth spatial dimension to solve puzzles (for example using it to navigate one's way around obstacles and put keys into locks).

I actually think that a phenomenology of abstruse science can go even further and get even more interesting than this. A fourth spatial dimension is one of the simplest ideas I can think of that is not directly understandable from an Earthly perspective, but easily described by maths. It also has the unfortunate position of quite possibly not actually being reality and certainly not yet being testably true reality. However, it is here, with this sort of application/idea that I would think a phenomenology of the interesting bits of high energy physics should start.

Twitter: @just_shaun

Art and Elsewheres

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Surface of Revolution with Constant Negative Curvature, 2008

I’m interested in abstraction as a real issue for creative collaborations between art and science. As I wrote in my last post, science habitually turns to orders of abstraction and mind-bendingly variable magnitudes of scale when it turns to mathematics; but ‘abstraction’ also has a very specific meaning for art, and especially modern painting. So what happens when you put these two kinds of abstraction — mathematical and aesthetic — together?

Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere was an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris late last year that put leading mathematicians and artists into contact with a open collaborative brief. The curator quotes the mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck to describe the exhibition’s aim as offering visitors “a sudden change of scenery.” The show was unusual enough to elicit some thoughtful response, not least a long interview with David Lynch, who contributed a film. "If you think of cosmology, you picture colourful nebulae; with neurology, intricate brain scans," notes the New Scientist. "But what does mathematics look like?" The answer is, implicitly, abstraction. The Nature review was a bit more curmudgeonly, accusing both the artists and the mathematicians of insufficient or obtuse communication. Other pieces in the show included included a live video feed from the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, Geneva: a groundbreaking-everyday kind of experiment which this reviewer — an astronomer — describes as "the mathematical word made flesh." For another commentator, the dominant theme was mystery: 

Mystery is perpetuated not only within the pieces and puzzles themselves, many of which are initially impenetrable to the mathematically untrained. It also lies more fundamentally within the very essence of the subject under examination. The message runs clear throughout: mathematics is in itself a mystery, the truth of which may never be attained. 

Sea Waves (wave equation) image from the film Mathematical Paradises, 2011.

 

Talking with Shaun recently about fractals and the questions they raise — are they art? are they science?  Does the mathematical basis and quality of endlessness make this an 'aesthetic' or a 'natural' object? — reminded me of the persistent problem of vocabulary for the desire to talk across these particular disciplinary lines. In a book titled What is Philosophy?, a collaboration between a philosopher and a practicing psychoanalyst, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari express the problem in this way:

When philosophy compares itself to science it sometimes puts forward a simplistic image of the latter, which makes scientists laugh. … Paul Klee’s vision was certainly more sound when he said that mathematics and physics, in addressing themselves to the functional, take not the completed form but formation itself as their object. … If philosophy has a fundamental need for the science that is contemporary with it, this is because science constantly intersects with the possibility of concepts and because concepts necessarily involve allusions to science that are neither examples nor applications, nor even reflections.

(Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 154-5, 162)

Ulam’s Spiral, in The Room of the Four Mysteries, part of a film by Beatriz Milhazes.

It strikes me that Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere is an attempt in the right direction at a real space of collaboration — the kind of thing that Deleuze and Guattari would call taking "not the completed form but formation itself as [its] object." This is for a couple of reasons. One, the sheer range of works and collaborations in the show. Each is a sincere attempt to bridge the gap through multiple types of visual languages, and in a range of different media, and no individual piece can claim to individually crack the problem. This variety is an important part of making the viewer aware of the potential heterogeneity of the art/science matrix. By comparison, the CERN residency picked only a single artist following a wide call for proposals, which is a relatively pre-determined approach that is more likely to fall into the trap of fixating on artistic personality.

Second, Michel Cassé — an astrophysicist and a co-curator of the Mathematics show — put a range of experienced specialists together, gave them an open brief, but required the outcome to take the form of an art exhibition. This is a useful constraint for a topic so predisposed to wander into the literally ineffable. And so, for all the occasional accusations of impenetrability by the critics, this is an approach to disciplinary collaboration that I hope we see more of in contemporary art: process-oriented, carefully conceptualized collaborations that are not just flashy "allusions to science" but that prioritize the actual objects, methods, and incipient discourses that might fail, may communicate only partly, but begin to construct the common vocabulary.

Live video feeds from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, Geneva

The invisible made visible

Last year, I uploaded a post about the Cell Picture Show, where researchers in the visualisation of molecular biology can exhibit some of their most impressive images. This month, Science has released its equivalent in the form of its visualisation challenge. This competition has been running for 9 years, with winners and honourable mentions announced in the categories of photography, illustration, informational graphics, interactive games and video. The examples this year are well worth a look - the image above is taken from the first place entry for informational graphics, entitle The Cosmic Web by Miguel. A. Aragon-Calvo et al. It depicts the overall structure of the Universe if you could see the various levels of organisation, and comes with a handy explanation for non-cosmologists like me. I really can't do it justice with this small image, so I encourage you to go and see the original for yourself! The people's choice winner for photography is entitled The Cliff of a Two-Dimensional World by Babak Anasori et al (below). There's something about this image that I love; the deep red on blue is reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, but in fact is what you see when you image ultrathin sheets of titanium compounds under an electron microscope.

The Science website also has archived records of previous years' winners, which are also well worth a look!

Image rights belong to Science and the original authors. 

On Scale

I recently encountered this "Scale of the Universe" widget: an animation tool that places the human body in the center of a sliding scale of dimensions ranging from the very big—the estimated size of the universe—to the unimaginable small of Quantum foam and string theory. Everything in-between is visualized comparatively: pollen grains set against Ultraviolet light and the width of human hair, mountain ranges against galactic distances.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Cloud Prototype No. 1 (2001), fiberglass and titanium alloy foil

The schema of extreme polarities in size reminded me of the two scientific images—an image of a cell and of an exploding star—I found so striking when thinking about impossible images. In many ways science works with scales that stretch the limits of the imaginable, or by using mathematics and data as forms of abstraction to manage the quantitatively big or the inconceivably small.

But conceiving scale concretely, as a visual image, can matter a lot in social ways. The first images of the earth from space created a point of view that had not existed before the 1960s, even though they described a concept that had been comprehended for centuries—a post-Copernican universe, in which the Earth is a planet among others. But those images entered the collective social imaginary instantly and viscerally, as something quantitatively new. In an odd way, the Apollo photographs didn’t de-centre the Earth into a universe wider than we can imagine so much as re-center it for our vision. By placing the whole Earth in the center of the frame of television images beamed to one of the first global audiences, those photographs let us see the planet in an entirety new way: as an entity. Many descriptions of these images invoke a sense of the fragility of the Earth, and they have been credited with contributing to a ecological consciousness.

For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light - our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.
-Ulf Merbold

Senses of Science

Four months ago I wrote a post about wonder in an attempt to sketch out the aspirational mood of this blog (or at least my sense of it). In six week increments since I’ve metaphorically returned to that mood and tried to make its implications more concrete by mapping out the actual directions that thinking about wonder and new lines of disciplinary mingling have led my own research: first, into the domain of science film, and second, into postulations about this genre within a critical category I called ‘the impossible image.’

So come December, I’ve decided to take the opportunity for reflection provided by the end of a calendar year and circle back to wonder, backlit by a sense of some things I’ve learned from this multi-directional conversation thus far. The hero of this post is an out-and-out iconoclast: the scientist and Surrealist filmmaker Jean Painlevé, whose six-decade career was devoted to the intertwining of science and art on every level. A biologist trained in the Laboratoire d’Anatomie et d’Histologie Comparée at the Sorbonne, Painlevé was an avant-garde photographer and filmmaker who penned countless texts, reviews, polemics, and manifestos; was politically active during and beyond the Second World War; and initiated a scientific film institute dedicated to supporting and disseminating science film well before the nexus of art and science was comprehended as a serious topic.

underwater bricolage: Jean Painlevé with his diving gear
"Everything is the center of the world. I'm forced to be multicentric."

Best of all, Painlevé is a humorist. His mesmerizing films and delicate photographs, chatty texts and sparking interviews give us a way to concretize a subtle quality of the aesthetics of wonder—the significance of pleasure in the strangeness and surprising beauty of the natural world. The mood of his contribution to the history of our topic seems to me perfectly encapsulated in Foucault's riff on discovery and the affects of wonder:

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes "care"; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.

 

Leonardo: A Painter at the Court of Milan, for the Twenty-First Century

Study of Arms and Hands, c. 1474

Study of a Woman, c. 1490

Earlier this month, one of those once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions opened in London: Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. It runs at the National Gallery until early February.

This isn't a review, since I haven't seen the show. But it amazes me that an exhibition like this exists, so consider this another 'live stream' post—a placeholder for reflections and mullings on and around Leonardo's unbelievable images, with some suggestions about why we are seeing more of this work; and subject to being updated with new links, reviews and so on.

To state the obvious, it isn't easy to put together an exhibition like this. In fact there has never been, and will never be, a 'complete' Leonardo retrospective in the manner of a Picasso, a Judd, or a Richter survey—those big, bulky exhibitions that cover the full range of a capacious individual's oeuvre, and of which one can say, with a certain admiration, "I am large, I contain multitudes." These kinds of shows are necessarily overwhelming because they cover a multifaceted life. But in this case the reasons are practical: some of these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century frescoes are site-specific (painted directly on a wall), and they are universally under bureaucratic lock and key: all Leonardo's work, from the most magnificent painting to the quickest, most fleeting of drawings are owed by institutions and individuals (and the Royal Family). So the problems of red tape for any curator contemplating this kind of mountainous show is unimaginable.

Studies of Water passing Obstacles and falling, c. 1508-9

"Nature, red in tooth and claw." and blue, and green, and yellow, and...

The picture above is a 'brainbow' created by a lab in Harvard - it is a fluorescent microscopy image of the hippocampus of a mouse genetically engineered to express three fluorescent proteins. Depending on how the genes of the individual neurones are randomly recombined, each cell will express a different combination of the three proteins, giving each a unique colour! I love the beauty of the resultant image, and it is a great example of the meeting of scientific and aesthetic research that is becoming more and more widespread. Another example is given below - natural fireworks revealed by labelling actin microtubules in dividing cells. These pictures and plenty of others are available in an online exhibition run by the journal Cell at the Cell Picture Show. The images are incredible and there are explanations of what's being shown for those without a biology background - well worth a visit!

Image rights belong to Cell and the original creators.

Three Impossible Images

1.

Marianne Moore, A Jellyfish (1959)

Of course this first one isn’t even an image, but a poem—a lyric. In this digital audio file at the SFMA Poetry Center you can hear Marianne Moore reading it. Listening to this clip is lovely, because it gives you a sense of the witty, self-depreciating charm of the personality behind the language.

If this poem is an ‘image,’ it is a drama of the almost-visible, starring a jellyfish. Quite a specific, individual jellyfish, swimming around as they do, and momentarily caught in a small poetic narrative. It is the jellyfish that is both visible and invisible: fluctuating, transparent, ethereal, sometimes translucent and sometimes highly colored, jewel-toned, gem-like, strangely compelling, very beautiful, intensely desirable, and alive.

The first lines of the poem contain so much all-over movement that you sense the liquidity before articulating it. Yet when the “arm/ approaches” everything changes. Suddenly it hits you that there’s no glass barrier, an aquarium or a zoo, to separate the person from the jellyfish, so that that this might actually be an eco-drama: a story of ecological ethics in which the arm is in the ocean with the jellyfish.

And this realization introduces two important other movements. When the arm drops back it registers fear, but also something else. “Abandon[ing] your intent” isn't exactly giving up. There’s a hint of purposeful letting go: a deliberate act of relinquishment, or an instinctive reaction to the liveness of the jellyfish’s quiver.

This poem is a kind of motionless animation. It is a drama in which what is not visible becomes more practically significant than we can see, so that a very attractive ‘thing’ is not removed from its environment.

Your weekly minute of physics

Minutephysics is a youtube channel that produces weekly, minute long videos about... physics (and maths sometimes too, but from a physicist's perspective).

I think the videos are great. I think the guy behind it is very talented. One small caveat should be given before I link you to some of my favourite videos he has made. He limits himself to explaining, in just one minute, some topics that are quite intricate. As a result he sometimes has to be a little liberal with the truth. I wouldn't say that anything he says is wrong, but I would say that it is often a highly simplified version of the truth, sometimes missing some very important pieces.

But if I put that caveat aside, I think minutephysics is an excellent and well executed idea. The video I've embedded above explains Dark Energy. It isn't actually the minutephysics guy talking but is a guest voice-over from physicist and prominent blogger Sean Carroll. So, if you're wondering what those guys won that Nobel Prize for a few weeks ago, have a watch and see (but do keep the truth-ness caveat in mind).

Really all of the minutephysics videos are worth a watch, but two of my favourites are:

Adding past infinity and There is no pink light

You should definitely watch both of them.

The feat of mathematical craziness worked through in the first one should blow your mind a little. You probably won't believe the claim made in the video, so check out this link to understand it a but further. If that isn't enough crazy for you, check this link out. This sort of crazy mathematics has some application in physics, but I don't feel confident enough right now to try to walk that minefield of balancing understandable explanation, without falling into over-simplification.

I really like the second video. I will explain why sometime later in the week in the comments. Anyway, it is also a (loosely) relevant video given the recent conversation about light that developed in the comments here.

Twitter: @just_shaun

Cheating at jigsaw puzzles

Recent guest poster and blog follower, Matt informed me of the following interesting example of science helping art. Or more precisely, helping recover art.

"In 1944, a bombing raid almost completely destroyed an enormous Padua church fresco that dated back to the Renaissance and had once been admired by Goethe. Some 88,000 tiny pieces of plaster were rescued from the rubble, and a mathematician has managed to piece some of the masterpiece back together."

Link to the original article.

I recommend going to the original article to properly understand what this clever mathematician has done. If I try to summarise I expect that my chances of accurate description are relatively small, given that I will be summarising a news story that is already a summary of the actual algorithm used by the mathematician.

It's a rare example of the overlapping of art, history and mathematics. The application won't have a profound impact on any of the disciplines, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Of course if the art historians had just given me all the pieces 13 or so years ago I'm sure I could have put them all together on one of the many afternoons I spent in the summer holidays watching cricket and piecing together progressively more complicated jigsaw puzzles. But, I'm sure they had their reasons to wait.

[With apologies to Shaun for editing this post, here are a couple of mathematical explanations of this research, beginning with a summary. -MM]

Massimo Fornasier, "Mathematics enters the picture." Mathematics and Statistics, 2009, Volume 3, 217-228.

Massimo Fornasier, "Faithful Recovery of Vector Valued Functions from Incomplete Data: Recolorization and Art Restoration," Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007, Volume 4485/2007, 116-127.

Massimo Fornasier, Domenico Toniolo, "Fast, robust and efficient 2D pattern recognition for re-assembling fragmented images." Pattern Recognition, Volume 38, Issue 11, November 2005, 2074-2087.

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Computer games, science and Foldit

Next Monday we will be having our first ever guest post (I know, I know, exciting right?). In anticipation of this great event and because it is loosely related I thought I would mention the following piece of incredible innovation humanity has shown. 

Foldit, is a computer game designed by Seattle based biochemist, David Baker. In the game the player twists and contorts a virtual protein molecule to try to guess its correct, or most efficient, shape. The game itself seems to be quite popular, at least for a small independent game of this nature.

Now ordinarily a game like this might be a quaint example of a clever scientist coming up with an innovative way to make his research more popular and understandable. However, this is not actually the primary aim of Foldit at all. The aim of Foldit is to use the insight and cleverness of the gamers to advance the science itself.

This sounds like a ridiculous idea, but as you can see in the video below, it turns out that the Foldit experiment isn't doing so badly.

And, as explained in this article at Nature News Blog, at an annual competition, intended for biochemists to predict the shapes of proteins, a team of Foldit players did surprisingly well. In fact, they made a genuine scientific discovery. From the article:

Foldit’s biggest success so far came after CASP9 [the annual competition], on an enzyme produced by a retrovirus called Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV). A player who goes by the name 'mimi' came up with a shape that would be accurate enough to serve as the basis for determining the real shape of the protein based on X-ray diffraction measurements

"The M-PMV structure had stumped scientists for a very long time before Foldit players made their breakthrough. This is the first example I know of game players solving a long-standing scientific problem," Baker wrote in an email.

You can find the game itself here.

How is this related to the upcoming guest post? Hah, you'll have to come back next Monday if you want to know the answer to that. In the meantime, don't forget to read the comments and join in with the discussion relating to Michelle's post below.

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Moving images, everywhere

A few years ago the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris opened a large public exhibition titled Le Mouvement des images (The Movement of Images) -- information and images here. The Centre Pompidou is France’s National Museum of Modern Art, covering both the 20th and 21st centuries, and it boasts one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of film and moving image art.

Le Mouvement des images was based on a straightforward but quite radical premise: that the art of the 20th century should be re-read through the cinema experience. What this implied was a reconsideration of assumptions about the relation of art and technology to include not just film and photography, but also the traditionally plastic arts: painting, sculpture, drawing. In short, the exhibition was “a redefinition of the cinematographic experience widened to include all the visual arts.”

The strength of the Pompidu’s collection meant that the exhibition’s curator Philippe-Alain Michaud had an opportunity rarely available to curators and academics - he was able to work directly from the museum’s holdings to literally re-organize the canon of modern art relative to the idea that the filmic and ‘static’ arts both reflect a technological influence. For example, in relation to series of drawings made by Picasso several minutes apart in 1970, the artist is quoted as observing “It’s the movement of the painting that interests me, the dramatic effort from one vision to the next.” Taking a dynamic principal like movement as subject tends to alter the painting’s emphasis from fixity to flux.

I mention Le Mouvement des images because it seems a good example of a perspective from within the arts relevant to the interdisciplinary interests of this blog. In part, this is because Michaud understands film to be something far more pervasive than Hollywood blockbusters: he defines ‘cinema’ in a way that includes the moving images that are a ubiquitous part of our daily life, including those on the internet, on iPhones, webcams, and in scientific laboratories.

Part of my interest in the specific art/science crossover comes out of the observation that moving images are an increasingly integral, even methodological component of contemporary scientific research. Some of my current reading on the topic goes so far as to suggest that filmic tools like live-cell imaging are changing biology by introducing a dynamic imaging process into the heart of the scientific method. In that vein, it is probably not a coincidence that a couple of Shaun and James’ recent posts have involved links to films - of animation by stop-motion, by cell structures, and by particles.

So if it seems viable to revise the history of Modern art from the point of view of dynamic images, can we extend that perspective to science? I’m curious about the perspective on film as a research tool from the other side of the art/science equation.

Image credit: Gerhard Richter, Halfmannshof (1968), Offset print on lightweight cardboard. Based on a photograph taken by the artist from a moving train.

Life, Jim, but not as we know it!

This is a video of cell-like structures being made from entirely non-organic components by a group in Glasgow. Primarily these so-called 'iCHELLS' (inorganic chemical cells) are made from metallic compounds, such as tungsten reacted with phosphate and oxygen. The bubble that results from injecting these compounds into a high-salt solution allows some molecules through but not others, much in the same way that a cell membrane does, and putting bubbles within these bubbles mimics the organisation of a real-life cell. The group is currently working on adding light-sensitive dyes to specific compartments in an attempt to recreate photosynthesis and generally making their structure and chemistry more complex and life-like.

This is an impressive achievement and whilst it's still absolutely no where near being a real, living cell, it does demonstrate that life in other parts of the universe may be based on entirely different chemistry to that on Earth! If that's the case then the number of potential planets that could support life may be massively more than our current estimates. This sort of thinking has been knocking around for a while now, but this is the first time that we've successfully recreated what it might look like in the lab! If you want more detail, have a look at the researchers' original paper or head over to a more thorough article in the New Scientist.