Art:

• Cezanne: Can’t quit you man
• American Kinetic sculpture at BMW: selling it
• LA Traffic Photos, and the maths behind it

Physics:

• A Lecture Missed: What is Time Anyway
• Reality problem: Electrons…

Economics:

• Capitalism: Basically Feudalism

Math:

• Cities: Crazy coincidences or the basic geometry
  

Art:

• SFMOMA: Brought to Light: Microscopy and Taaffe
• American photography’s relationship to Hopper & Companion Book: Edward Hopper & Company: Hopper’s Influence on Photography
• low-contrast female vs high-contrast male?

Physics:

• Scientists image most distant object in the universe 13-billion light-years away

Maps:

• National Geo: Place name maps

…Most Fridays I’ll try to post links to a variety o thangs…

Art:

• Michael Fried: Why Photography Matters

Physics:

• Entanglement and our presumption of “Locality”, Einsteinian errors?

Design:

• Idea for Portland’s Trimet & other Public Transportation?
• Inventions that experts say wouldn’t work
• The Art Car I own at Bavarian Autoworks website

Portion of E8

A year ago, I posted a link to Murray Gell-Mann’s TED talk called, Beauty and truth in physics. In this talk Gell-Mann talked a lot about about symmetry.

Basically “things” with some form of symmetry have characteristics that don’t change under certain transformations (read “change”). Beautiful. Symmetry goes way beyond most people’s view of symmetry as just mirror images about a line. Amazing symmetries also exist in magnificently complex structures. Mathematicians have described a structure called E8 that is the largest possible structure with unique symmetries.

E8 is a theoretical structure in 248 dimensions. More properly it is an object known as the exceptional Lie group E₈.

Enter theorist Garrett Lisi. Very basically, he looks at the relationship between the known “elementary” 226 particles on to a representation on the 248 points of the E8. You can play with the particles and the E8 online at:
http://deferentialgeometry.org/epe/

Elementary Particle Explorer Garrett Lisi

You can hear his presentation at the TED talks at:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_everything.html

Or course there are detractors:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=garrett-lisi-e8-theory

Light traveling backward faster than the Speed of light, copyright University of Rochester

Yes, current theories did predict this bizarre possibility that Robert Boyd discovered. Einstein, as it turns out, didn’t say nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, he said that “information can’t travel faster than light.”

This effect was created using exotic techniques and materials.

Boyd explains, “The pulse of light is shaped like a hump with a peak and long leading and trailing edges. The leading edge carries with it all the information about the pulse and enters the fiber first. By the time the peak enters the fiber, the leading edge is already well ahead, exiting. From the information in that leading edge, the fiber essentially ‘reconstructs’ the pulse at the far end, sending one version out the fiber, and another backward toward the beginning of the fiber.” “The backward pulse meets and cancels out the initial pulse, so only the final pulse remains.”

To read all about these strange behaviors see: http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2544

Check out this animation: http://www.rochester.edu/news/photos/backward_light.mpg

Researchers have created the shortest-ever flash of light which lasted only 80 attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second).  They pulsed already fast pulses of light on specialized (chirped) mirrors to intersect on jets of neon gas to create this super-short pulses.

The 80 attosecond laser pulse that illuminates neon atoms that the first 2500 attosecond pulse is traveling through.  The longer laser pulse ionizes the neon atoms and causes them to glow.  All of this happens so quickly that we only see about one and and a half oscillations of the first pulse, basically just two high peaks and a deep wave valley between them. Again what we are seeing is not the first laser pulse but its ionizing effect on the neon atoms as it passes through them.

How what sorts of things happen on these time scales?  Well, to put all of this into perspective, it takes only 24 attoseconds for an electron to travel from one side of a hydrogen atom to the other.

How short can they go? …well according to Quantum physics the smallest measurement of time one Planck time (10^-44 sec).  So this pulse was 80*10²⁶; times longer.  So they still have some way to go

My thoughts:

Why does this matter to art or artists? As we all come to grips with the ultimate realities it should inform our art. Or maybe we should all dump conceptual art and head back to liturgical art. Influences and inspirations can come from all fields of inquiry.

Max-Planck Institute press release.

Eric Towers put it this way (Sat Jun 21 05:39:27 BST 2008)

Light is neither a wave nor a particle. A photon is a probability density function on the product space of positions and momenta. (Product space, classically. Adding relativity, the space is slightly deformed.) Insofar as this distribution can be projected onto the position subspace, the photon is a “smeared out” particle. Insofar as this distribution can be projected onto the momentum subspace, the photon is a “smeared out” wave.

The error is one of “cart before the horse”. “Wave” and “Particle” are idealizations created as models to help us understand the world. These two concepts are simplifications, fictions. There is absolutely no reason to believe that anything in the natural world somehow implements any of our fictions. So it is always backwards to ask “is a photon a wave?” or “is a photon a particle?”. It is proper to ask “what particle-like (or wave-like) behavior does this photon exhibit?” I.e. It is proper to ask to what degree some natural phenomenon can be adequately modeled by some idealization.

He talks a lot about symmetry. Symmetry goes way beyond simple mirror images about a line. Amazing symmetries also exists in magnificantly complex structures such as as E8.  E8 is the largest possible immense structure with unique symmetry. Basically things with some form of symmetry have characteristics that don’t change under change. What a better way to understand things that change and those characteristics. Beautiful.

And if you want to read more you can read his very approachable book, “The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.”

Gell-Mann in 1964 postulated the existence of quarks. Then later described hadrons their puzzling physics, proposed the name “quark”, and won a Nobel prize for the quarks. He has a wide and eclectic set of interests from Buddhism, East Asian antiquities, linguistics, bird watching, archeology and many others. He also invested a lot of effort into the study of complexity theory where he also was instrumental part of Santa Fe Institute (where complexity and other multi-disciplinary things are studied).

To learn more about symmetry, try these podcasts…

Studio 360 Podcast with Mario Livio: Symmetry

BBC podcast on symmetry

Below, one of these images is Umberto Boccioni’s “Dynamism of a Soccer Player” from 1913 and the other is a modern 3D representation of the Calabi-Yau manifold which is used in various String theories of fundamental physics.

Futurism

Umberto Boccioni and the other futurists tried to come up with universal models of movement. Boccioni said, “Dynamism is the lyrical approach to forms, which are interpreted in the endless phenonmenon of the reality of absolute and relative motions of surroundings and object, down to the formation of an overall phenomenon: surroundings + object. It is the creation of a new form, intended to represent the relativity of mass and extension. Between rotating and circling motion in other word, life itself is captured in the form which life engenders in its endless succession.”

String Theory

In various string theories of modern physics there are 10 or 11 dimensions with many of these extra 6-7 dimensions (beyond our 3 spatial and one time dimension) so small as to be undetectable in our experience. These special dimensions must have special properties to fit all of the intrinsic properties of elementary particles. These dimensions are described as Calabi-Yau spaces. These manifolds can be visualized in a 3D projection. Wikipedia entry for string theory.

I think the ties are even closer than some of the visual connections that you may have noticed in a quick and cursory glance. More at some point…

Image info: Calabi-Yau manifold (3D projection), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Calabi-Yau.png This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one.