Lately we have also focused our attention on envisioning beautiful and essential concepts from nature by developing new conventions which help us intuit what is happening.  Here are two atoms - helium and carbon displaying their energy levels and two other essential features that give the atom aspects of its character (spin and angular momentum). 

Copyright; Cox Tarbutt 2013

Atoms 'speak' to light when electrons move from one concentric circle (or energy state) in our pictures to another, this is resonance.  In this new film, I try to explain resonance, the beautiful phenomenon that occurs everywhere and at every scale in Nature and which may offer clues to happiness.

Finally, I recommend the glorious works of sculptor Alexander Calder who came from three generations of artists and trained originally as an engineer.  His mobiles and stabiles from the mid forties are the exceptional jewels amongst his work.  They are mesmerising conversations with Nature, humble and powerful in their economy, making visible the forces at play. Shown here at Pace Gallery and which I urge you to see before June 7 when the exhibition closes.

To better grasp some of the ideas, it's been fun trying to visualise what is happening in helpful ways. Nature operates probabilistically at such tiny scales and so lends itself to pattern making. Here in the yellow stick patterns are the spin statistics of entangled electrons rendered in what we now call the Cox convention. For the physics minded reader - each stick is a measurement direction and the blue and red are spin results (up/down).

What's in the pipeline? It has been an interesting pleasure to spend time with a new group this year who are working on the microscopic relations between light and matter, in particular surface waves in matter called plasmons. One of the results is likely to be a new short film about resonance. And now at last that we are turning further towards the sun we are focused on building the natural light cinema in the yurt. Our clever and talented team are putting things together and I hope to report back soon.

In the idealised picture, each point marks the position of the sun at midday above London on the first day of the month (January being 1 and so on).  The figure of eight is due to the elliptical path of the Earth about the sun and the tilt of the Earth's axis.

And below - rows of freshly made print triptychs basking in the homemade sunshine of the 'Apple Pie' painting.

It is beaming down on people at Fulham Palace Road too from 29th October - 11th November.  See www.madecurious.com.

The fledgling pop up cinema has arrived on our rooftop and work has begun on protoyping and designing the optics and solar powered system.

And continuing the theme of joy from last time....

We are still busy with our London billboard project which I will reveal in the next entry. 

We have been fortunate to receive an award from the college and EPSRC to create a new project - a convergence of ideas from this past year and some new ones.  We will build a natural light 'pop up' cinema in a traditional yurt.  Our aim is that it will be wholly powered by daylight and share with people the experiences of looking out at the world through physics.  As well as showing little films in a camera obscura style, the dark room will be used to reveal the beautiful and deep characteristics of light.  Once built, the little show will travel across the UK.  

Lots of people in the department are involved and bringing their unique talents and knowledge to bear.  

The name 'yurt' originated from a Turkic word meaning the imprint left when the structure is moved.

Here are a few early snaps from the first week of our project....

A trip to our yurt builder.  An example structure - beautiful in its economy.  Our's will be completely dark inside.

Peter Torok (physicist and electrical engineer) and I test to see if we can make an LCD from an old monitor work with an overhead projector.  This is the basis for our system, except the electric bulb will be replaced by daylight gathered from outside - camera obscura style.  Here in our proof of principle we are projecting onto the ceiling of Peter's office.

The roof will be made of flexible organic photovoltaic fabric.  Jenny Nelson, physicist and expert in solid state and solar technologies has calculated that it will generate enough power to run the sound, video and LCD - even on a cloudy day.

Above, quantum information theorist, David Jennings, talks through some possible ideas for imagery that will decorate the outside.  Here we draw schematics for quantum entanglement, quantum field theory and engineered quantum energy levels.

Here are two small art proofs.  I have been exploring the expressive possibilities of lino printing - a new technique for me.  Maybe this way of working will inform the final artwork designs for the exterior of the little cinema.  Here is a version of "there is always the chance of an unexpected result that will shake the world"  and "yellow interference pattern".

Finally - my current reading and book for life: "A Cultural History of Physics" - a great encyclopedic beautiful book, written by physicist Karoly Simonyi.  First published in Hungarian in the late seventies - it has been updated and is now in English.  Read Freeman Dyson here and get yourself a copy.  

'Finding Patterns' began one year ago.  I celebrated by experimenting with the flight of an armful of brilliantly coloured helium balloons in the eleven storey department stairwell - this is my makeshift studio and balloon launching area amongst laboratory equipment at the foot of the stairs.  

In this tiny snippet of one of the launches - even the orange balloon finds its way towards the top.

Digital video 1:33 mins

In the afternoon, I made drawing studies in a the colourful office of a physicist. 

Ink drawing study of an atom cooling experiment across three pagees of sketchbook

The last few months have been a whirlwind of creativity and ideas leading to some new works, each opening up potential lines of enquiry and expression and feeding one into the other. I'd rather you see the work than read what I think.  I'll just put down a few pointers and brief explanations as to how various things came about.  

For context, maybe you'll find it helpful to read my first short essay - 'physics - my understanding'. It informs the sensibility of this work which is an attempt to capture the essence of scientific life and understand how perspectives can be enriched when seen through the lenses of art and science. 

Chalkboard  This little film project began over tea one day when theoretical physicist, Jonathan Halliwell expressed his interest in capturing the physical sensation of working on the chalkboard. We started out by making footage of the texts remaining on the blackboard after Jonathan's quantum mechanics lectures. By experimenting with a range of cameras and lenses, I was able to get close-ups of some of the most abstract marks and we were surprised and pleased to discover a cosmic landscape that gave space for the imagination to wander.   We applied a soundtrack of Jonathan's overtone singing which we recorded one evening in the department's eleven storey stairwell.  Overtone singing allows the singer to produce two tones at the same time.  It is a strange effect and we found it enhanced the sense of otherworldliness.   The ending is the first footage run backwards - a time reversal symmetry that brings us back to where we first began. 

Finding patterns  'Chalkboard' was amongst my first introductions to film making and taught me that I can take the world beneath my fingertips and transform it by experimenting with scale and effects and choreographing the viewer's experience.  Returning to my sketchbooks with a sense of fresh potential, I took some of the studies I'd made at Imperial and focused on enhancing the moments I'd been pursuing in the drawings. The result is "Finding Patterns", a tiny celebratory film about the never ending story of life in physics.   I chose Johann Strauss's joyous and playful 'Blue Danube' for the soundtrack - though it meant borrowing back from Stanley Kubrick who used the piece in his 'Space Odyssey 2001' and imbuing it with fresh meaning.  

Yellow balloon (and other projects in the stairwell)

"And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

T. S Elliot, from 'The Quartets' - "Little Gidding"

T. S Elliot's quote and the spiral as a metaphor for learning comes up from time to time in conversation and is embodied in the beauty of the eleven storey department stairwell with its ceaseless flow of life and voices.  I began recording myself.  First simply by placing the camera at the bottom and tracing the locus of my hand as I ran to the top.  The idea grew and I started to experiment with balloons as markers, filled with my own breath or helium.  With serendipity of physics and humanity, unplanned events occurred which conjured new metaphors for life, wonder and learning.  This is "Yellow Balloon" and other narratives are here. 

Oil on canvas + light emitting diode, 168 x 138 cm

Yellow thought experiment   Numerous conversations and amazing experiences in the first few months at Imperial overwhelmed me and took me away from painting for a while.  What bought me back was reading the poems of Allen Ginsberg and his passionate proclamations on physics and discovery.  I was reminded about the richness of paint for presenting emotional ideas, new worlds and pyschological spaces - things that exist intangibly.  With a renewed focus on the marriage between the medium and the message, I have begun a series of thought experiments. This 'yellow thought experiment' is the first. Though cluttered with the stuff I find as I travel around peoples' workspaces - funny toys, workings out, old trainers and pairs of spectacles.......it is essentially an abstract space, the space of the mind. The light emitting diode mounted into the canvas breaks the illusion - it signifies an interesting idea and raises questions of reality.

Hi beautiful experiment  And lastly to say that I've begun working with film, writing poetry and my own voice to capture the essence of a piece of physics or an experiment in a miniscule poem-documentary. This is the first - 'beautiful experiment'.  In 44 seconds it tries to express the entirety of this fantastic creation in a basement laboratory - a tiny cloud of red lit atoms, suspended in space that is colder than outer space. The idea came from conversations with the experimental physicist, Mike Tarbutt who shared his experiments and re-introduced me to the poems of Philip Larkin who is almost joyous when talking about nature.  The tone of our conversations and Larkin's words have influenced this work. I'd like these films to captivate the viewer before the consciousness has ever had chance to grasp what just happened.

Other things are on the go:  large scale projection on the outside of the building; more poem documentaries ("all the light in the universe" with cosmologist - Andrew Jaffe); more thought experiment paintings - this time, a big apple pie in oil paint surrounded by granulated sugar from Kenya and a magician displayed with the canvas as a sort of hanging curtain.  And maybe an addendum to the relief sculpture at the front of the building to bring together the physics emblems of the last 50 years.

I have been influenced recently by the artists: Fernand Leger (his film, 'Ballet Mecanique'); Nori Yorstein; Jean Painleve; Godfrey Reggio/Philip Glass for "Koyannisqatsi"; and as mentioned, Philip Larkin and Allen Ginsberg.

I close with a link to the first 'visual poem', titled after a quote by scientist, Victor Weisskopf - "Nature Begins to Recognise Itself".  I made this early on in the project after having read a lot of books and spoken with many scientists.  My head was bursting with imagery, and I selected these as the most poignant expression of what I had learnt about the experience of looking out and trying to make sense at the world.  The film includes the first stairwell film, which is the only section to have soundtrack - a moment of discovery.  The film ends with footage of butterflies, taken on a hot summers day in the steamy atmosphere of the temporary butterfly house on the front lawn of the Natural History Museum. They are a signifier of the brilliance, surprise, concreteness and intangibility of ideas.

The first entry of 2012 is all about physics, art and 'finding patterns'.  

I’ve been asking around the department trying to identify the various forms in the relief sculpture above the physics building entrance made by sculptor and RCA professor, John Skeaping circa 1958. The intiguing motif pictured above remained stubbornly unidentified until the week before Christmas when I had the good fortune to arrive in Chris Philips' office and learn that it is probably the pattern made on the surface of a crystal by an irregularity called a screw dislocation. 

Screw dislocations occur in crystal structures as they grow or when they are placed under stress.  Part of one plane of molecules or atoms is shifted relative to its neighbour.  In the diagram below, you can imagine how travelling in a circular path around the dislocation line from the far left surface would take you on a helical path through the material from A to B.  

The tell tale sign on the surface of a crystal is a spiral, like those in our sculpture or in these images of silicon carbide.

Once a dislocation has developed the crystal growth continues the pattern.  Click on the image below to see video footage. 

Screw dislocations are important to understand particularly in the production of semi conductor lasers, so that we can learn how to avoid them. Chris says " If a crystal is perfect, when you excite it with an electrical current, the electrons and holes you are injecting recombine to give you the laser light you want. Dislocations, however, introduce “non-radiative” recombination; carriers recombine there in a way that generates heat and no light. Worse, the heat drives chemical degradation processes, (so-called “dark line defects if you want to get technical) which, over time, lead to device failure. This is a big problem if, e.g. the laser device is buried deep under the Atlantic at the time. So, we don’t like screw dislocations!"

We tentatively think we also solved another enigma in the Blackett building sculpture.....

Chris says, the crystalline structure shown here in the original design suggests one of the technologically important semiconductors used to make lasers, the internet and computer chips – Gallium Arsenide (shown in 1, 1, 1 plane).  

Compared with silicon, GaAs is a very efficient emitter of light (due to its direct band gap structure) and has the advantage of being relatively insensitive to heat.  It is massively used in fibre optics communications networks – a vital component to the working of the internet and our modern world.

A demonstration model is shown below.

Thanks to Chris for solving the mysteries and for casting his eye over these notes.

Chris Philips is in the Experimental Solid State Group at Imperial College.