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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The smoking CMB evidence of the Big Bang

The centre of the galaxy and a sliver of the CMB anisotropies

I was asked recently how I know that the Big Bang definitely happened. This post will be my attempt to answer that question. I will focus on something called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB for the rest of this post). The CMB is as close to smoking gun evidence of the Big Bang as you can get. In fact, it's such good evidence that it is better than a smoking gun. The figure of speech should no longer be “smoking gun evidence”. It should be “smoking CMB evidence”.

The other reason I am writing about the CMB is that humanity's prediction of its existence and our subsequent measurements of it and its properties are jaw-droppingly stunning pieces of detective work. If you are ever feeling down about human nature and our propensity to do kind of stupid things then just remember what you're about to read and reassure yourself that at times we can be incredible.

What is “The Big Bang”? (A very brief review)

Everywhere we look things are moving away from us and the further away we look the faster things are moving. This means that the distance between any two unbound objects in the observed universe is increasing. Or, in other words, the universe is expanding. As time goes on things will get further apart, the total density of the universe will decrease and the temperature of outer space will go down.

But what happens if we run the clock backwards? Well, naturally, things will get closer together, the total density of the universe will increase and the temperature of outer space will go up. This suggests that at one point far back in time the universe was in a very hot, very dense state that was rapidly expanding. This, and nothing else, is the essence of what the Big Bang model of the universe is.

Of course, we understand how the matter in the universe behaves at the current, low, temperatures. Also, thanks to results from particle accelerators and other experiments we even know how the matter in the universe behaves at quite high temperatures. This means that we can make very definite statements about what the universe should have looked like when it was below those temperatures. But, although we can and should speculate about what the universe might have looked like above these temperatures, we can't yet say anything about those times with certainty.

So, if you let me repeat myself for emphasis, at its heart the Big Bang model is nothing more and nothing less than the idea that the universe was at some point in the past very hot, very dense and rapidly expanding. To work out whether this is what the universe was actually like or not we need to know what the present day consequences of this might be. To answer that question we should take a closer look at what the universe we see now would actually look like at these higher temperatures.

Muammar Gaddafi

I had a pre-prepared, midweek, filler post ready to upload today but instead, here is my reflection on the death of Gaddafi.

This video really struck me, particularly the complete and utter lifelessness of the body being dragged along the ground. No matter who you are, no matter how powerful you become, no matter how much wealth you acquire, one day you will be nothing more than a sack of meat. I don't mean this observation to spark one of those Carpe Diem, seize the day, make the most of your life, type of realisations. That isn't my natural response to this. If there is a group of people throughout history who have seized the day and lived their life to the fullest, then Mr Gaddafi is definitely a member. What I am drawn to do is to wonder what part of life is worth seizing, because for all of Gaddafi's pride and power and extravagance during his life, he still ended up cowering inside a pipe, in the city of his birth, begging his pursuers "don't shoot". Nothing Gaddafi lived for now remains. Nothing.

I can't help but compare Gaddafi's death to the also recent death of Dennis Ritchie. Most of us probably didn't even know who Dennis Ritchie was before he died (I didn't). Yet, he played an instrumental part in developing one of the most widely used computer programming languages. He also played a key part in developing the computer operating system who's descendants power the world.

One of these two people lived his life full of glory, fame, fortune and grandeur. The other did not and I highly doubt was any less happy because of it. But which one's life has the greater legacy? Who's impact will still exist hundreds of years from now and who's impact is gone already (mere hours after his death)?

While most of us are not going to become dictators of oil-rich nations or design programming languages that end up used throughout the world, the same decision exists for anyone with the tiniest shred of ambition. Strive for popularity and acceptance, now? Or, strive for a lasting impact on tomorrow?  Certainly the second path can often lead to the same destination as the first. But, any time we spend pursuing the first path for its own sake inevitably leads us further away from the destination of the second.

No matter how much glory we obtain, or seizing of the day that we do, one day we will all be soulless sacks of meat, just like Colonel Gaddafi.

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Historical Transparency-washing?

[Note from Shaun: the following is a guest post from Matthew Metcalfe. Just like our previous guest poster, Matt and I went to school together. While, at heart, Matt is as kiwi as a 50 cent lolly mixture, he currently lives in Munich. He is also a trained historian. The following is Matt's searching account of an attempt by one of the richest families in Germany, the Quandt dynasty, to transparently(?) reveal their family history.]

"The Rise of the Quandts"

Since I agree with the premise of this blog – the desire to combine the arts and science – I wanted to open up a short chapter on a development out of the circles of German historiography (in German such courses of study belong to the “breadless arts”).

Where most people see politics as current affairs, when you are an historian, you tend to see history everywhere; behind trade deals, bilateral agreements, political and religious conflicts in northern Africa or the Middle East.

If I had to explain how I see the world, for me the world events seem to happen like untidy piles of photos. At any one point you can see the top photos, showing a snapshot of history. But they always overlap, are different sizes and of varying quality and sharpness.

As you pick off the top photos (for most people the current affairs on the news) you see that the motifs are similar but the faces are different. The overlaps and the connections move back and forth as you go through layer on layer.

Three-and-a-half years ago there was an industrial family dynasty where the stack of photos seemed rather short and orderly. The Quandts were a quiet bunch, not talking about their family in detail, typical for tight-knit powerful families. This was all the more interesting because of the sharpness of some of the photos (both real and metaphorical).

For those unfamiliar with the name, the Quandt family, among the richest in Germany, has been the controlling shareholder of BMW since the 1950s. Even though the shareprice is down and analysts are currently saying to buy while it is underpriced, the total fortune of the various family members is estimated at a total of upwards of US30bn, thanks to the wealth of companies they control.

As is the case with many industrial dynasties in Germany, it was safely assumed that the Quandts had profited disproportionately from the policies and crimes perpetrated during the period of National Socialism.

In spite of this, due to the facts that

1. the members of the family directly involved had died before the major wave of investigations into companies were initiated after intense pressure by victim organisations (e.g. companies like Allianz, Deutsche Bank) 
2. the successors to the family fortune had never really wanted to delve into the darker corners of their father’s closet and jealously guarded the archival material,

the exact details of the involvement had never surfaced.

Until, however, a documentary called “The Silence of the Quandts” in 2007, produced and broadcasted by the German broadcaster ARD let off a bombshell and accused the family of intentionally silencing their history and the growth of their fortune, social and political influence on the backs of concentration camp slave labour during WWII.

...But That Was [Yesterday]

Hello dear readers,

So on Monday we will be receiving our second ever guest post. That almost makes us a legitimate, web-worthy, ready to be viewed by the masses blog, right?

To tide us all over until that momentous moment I will let a discussion from the comments on the last guest post spill over into a new blog post. As you might remember, that post was on whether games can be classified as art. In the comments, Michelle pointed out that one way in which games challenge our definition of art is that the interaction which is such a necessary element of games, also lessens how contemplative they can be. And in "conventional" art, contemplation is almost the entire point and purpose.

While I think both Barnabas and Michelle would argue that games need not be contemplative to succeed in becoming art, this needn't stop me from trying to point out some contemplative games.

So, as some candy for the weekend, I give you ...But That Was [Yesterday] (which was actually buried in a list of recommended games in one of the links in Barnabas' original post).

source: jayisgames.com

Go here for the game designer's blog post about the game. At the link you can see links to other games by the same designer. How My Grandfather Won The War is also a very good game that forces the player to think about the game while playing. Difficult, but good.

I like ...But That Was Yesterday. It is not a game so much as an interactive story. The game elements are there not to give you a game, but to force you to take part in the story. When events happen to the character, the actions you are forced to take then force you to think about and also even feel to a certain degree what is happening.I think it is done well, it certainly drew an emotive response out of me when I played it. And I think it did so in a way that was only possible because of the interactive element, not despite it.

If you have the time (which you do because it shouldn't take longer than 10 minutes) it is well worth a play through, especially if you don't normally "play games". Give this one a try. Once you've played it through, your thoughts are certainly welcome in the comment section. As are links to other games that might pass the contemplative test.

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