Models of light

This morning's visit to the MSc optics lab with Peter Torok revealed this fantastic model for visualising the effect of a lense on light.  Regard the lens positioned perpendicular to surface, to the left of the model. The highest peak is the focal point.  These days, students usually see this rendered in 3-d on computer.

above - move optics lab

above - a model of the surface of light waves made in 1876, based on Fresnel's work in the 1820's on crystal optics. The surface represents a wave front of light radiating from a point in a crystal: Two shells touch each other in four places. (displayed in the Science Museum).

below - my shadow, south ken wall

Jenny Moncur

Jenny Moncur created this flooring design in linoleum for the ICA in 1987.  Every landing has a different pattern.

Durer and geometry

It's 1525 and Durer authors this treatise on geometry.

Durer shows how to cut a cone to obtain a parabola and on the right how light is reflected from a plane

surface and from a surface whose cross section is a parabola.

See - the Science Museum section on mathematics.

Beautiful surface

Found in the mathematics section of the Science Museum, this model was used in the late ninteenth century to illustrate lectures on equations.  It is the surface for: Z=3a(x²-y²)-(x³+y³)

The blue line is a straight line, the green lines are ellipses, the red lines are parabolas, the black and yellow lines - cubic equations and the dark red line - a simple contour line.

Models like this inspired artists like Henry Moore and Max Ernst.

Solar

Suspended lion face

Spilling at the centre

Of an unfurnished sky

How still you stand,

And how unaided

Single stalkless flower

You pour unrecompensed.

The eye sees you

Simplified by distance

Into an origin,

Your petalled head of flames

Continuously exploding.

Heat is the echo of your

Gold.

Coined there among

Lonely horizontals

You exist openly.

Our needs hourly

Climb and return like angels.

Unclosing like a hand,

You give for ever.

Philip Larkin 

- from High Windows

Feynman diagrams - 6 photon scattering, 120 possible sequences

A small multiple of the 120 possible event-sequences for 6-photon scattering. 

any-angled light

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My litany would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

-- Philip Larkin

Sent by a physicist friend this morning for its beautiful imagery about light in the last verse.  

Butterfly Dream

Zhuangzi dreaming of a butterfly (or a butterfly dreaming of Zhuangzi)

An email from a theoretical physicist friend continued my thinking about butterflies... Chuang-tzu was a Taoist teacher and writer who lived in the fourth century BC.

"Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly" (莊周夢蝶 Zhuāng Zhōu mèng dié). 

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things. (2, tr. Burton Watson 1968:49)

Basho created this haiku in response.....

You are the butterfly
And I the dreaming heart
Of Chuang-tzu.

– Basho

Secrets, facts and principles.....

Irresistible title discovered in S. Ken book shop.

More physicists..........

I continue to collect imagery some as potential material for my short film........

TR's pipe.....'ceci n'est pas une pipe'

DW's scratched, chalk dusty glasses

Joan Miro - Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse

The Joan Miro show at Tate Modern finished week.  The most memorable and stunning piece is the vast 1968 triptych: Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse

Adrian Searle at the Guardian liked it too: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/11/joan-miro-tate-modern

It needs to be seen to be appreciated.  It is a world line, a strange trajectory, a life lived, a concise and beautiful statement.

Acrylic on canvas

267,8 x 352 cm

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Lectures to Women on Physical Science - J. C. Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell was a prolific poet and his poems often contain a mash up of life and physics.  I particularly enjoyed his lectures to women............

(Note: Thankfully, women are now a significant minority in physics.  At Imperial around of 25% students and faculty are women and the department lead is Prof Joanna Haigh).

PLACE. -- A small alcove with dark curtains.
The class consists of one member.
SUBJECT. -- Thomson’s Mirror Galvanometer.


The lamp-light falls on blackened walls, 
And streams through narrow perforations, 
The long beam trails o’er pasteboard scales, 
With slow-decaying oscillations. 
Flow, current, flow, set the quick light-spot flying, 
Flow current, answer light-spot, flashing, quivering, dying,

O look! how queer! how thin and clear, 
And thinner, clearer, sharper growing 
The gliding fire! with central wire, 
The fine degrees distinctly showing. 
Swing, magnet, swing, advancing and receding, 
Swing magnet! Answer dearest, What's your final reading?

O love! you fail to read the scale 
Correct to tenths of a division. 
To mirror heaven those eyes were given, 
And not for methods of precision. 
Break contact, break, set the free light-spot flying; 
Break contact, rest thee, magnet, swinging, creeping, dying. 


II. 

Professor Chrschtschonovitsch, Ph.D., "On the C. G. S. system of Units."
Remarks submitted to the Lecturer by a student.


Prim Doctor of Philosophy 
Front academic Heidelberg! 
Your sum of vital energy 
Is not the millionth of an erg. 
Your liveliest motion might be reckoned 
At one-tenth metre in a second. 
"The air," you said, in language fine, 
Which scientific thought expresses, 
"The air -- which with a megadyne, 
On each square centimetre presses -- 
The air, and I may add the ocean, 
Are nought but molecules in motion." 

Atoms, you told me, were discrete, 
Than you they could not be discreter, 
Who know how many Millions meet 
Within a cubic millimetre. 
They clash together as they fly, 
But you! -- you cannot tell me why. 

And when in tuning my guitar 
The interval would not come right, 
"This string," you said, "is strained too far, 
’Tis forty dynes, at least too tight!" 
And then you told me, as I sang, 
What overtones were in my clang. 

You gabbled on, but every phrase 
Was stiff with scientific shoddy, 
The only song you deigned to praise 
Was "Gin a body meet a body," 
"And even there," you said, "collision 
Was not described with due precision." 

"In the invariable plane," 
You told me, "lay the impulsive couple." 
You seized my hand -- you gave me pain, 
By torsion of a wrist so supple; 
You told me what that wrench would do, -- 
"’Twould set me twisting round a screw." 

Were every hair of every tress 
(Which you, no doubt, imagine mine), 
Drawn towards you with its breaking stress -- 
A stress, say, of a megadyne, 
That tension I would sooner suffer 
Than meet again with such a duffer! 

Piet Mondrian

From this image and others in this series, I anticipated that Piet Mondrian was contemplating a deeper understanding of what makes up the world........ I discovered his words on the subject today.

'For there are 'made' laws, 'discovered' laws, but also laws - a truth for all time.  These are more or less hidden in the reality which surround us and do not change.  Not only science but art also, shows us that reality, at first incomprehensible, gradually reveals itself by the mutual relations that are inherent in things'.

The way sunlight was falling........

Early morning light falling on 'all matter is the same', on the first day of September, 2011

Photo: Terry Rudolph

Well read books in the library

I asked myself - which books have had the most use in Imperial College's physics library?  Judging the books by their covers, Richard Feynman's lectures are nominees.

Beautiful engineering

This Rolls Royce fan system is in the Imperial engineering building - it is one of the most beautiful sculptural forms I have seen.

Finding patterns

Stephen W. Morris is a pattern finding scientist in the most vivid sense.

tp://www.flickr.com/photos/nonlin/sets/

I am particularly taken with these images of Chladni plates (the violin shape at 762.4 Hz and the square at 5,875.5 Hz).  

A thin metal plate shaken vertical by a post in the centre will vibrate in a certain mode pattern. The pattern can be made visible by sprinkling white sand or salt on the plate. The grains are shaken off the areas where the plate is moving most violently (the anti-nodes) and collects on the non-moving regions (nodal lines). This technique was originally invented by Robert Hooke, but made famous by Ernst Chladni in the late 18th century.

Violin makers use Chladni Figures to tune boards used to make violins. Here the violin is a sheet of aluminum about 1 meter long.

And I like this quote from Stephen's website:

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Henri Poincaré

Stephen's website http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~smorris/smorris.html

In response, I add the electron probability density for the first few hydrogen atom electron orbitals shown as cross-sections. 

Charles Bukowski

Bukowski never had much to say about physics, but these are up there with the best poems on life and the philosophical driving force behind this project.

'The Laughing Heart', read by Tom Waits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va1t6a0zCkQ

'Bluebird', read by Bukowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmWZOsVtqR0

Animation - the impact of the economical

Thinking about putting narratives together in my work, I made a visit to 'The Animation Show' at the Barbican in London.   I was struck by how economy of means seemed to relate directly to impact.

I discovered master Russian animator, Yuri Norstein and his masterwork 'Tales of Tales', 1979.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmcp4XNCWRY

And Fernand Leger's 'Ballet Mecanique', 1924, which I enjoyed for the fast paced imagery that was packed with physics: different ways of seeing, perspectives, simple harmonic oscillators, symmetries and every so often would return to one of his drawings, which seemed to provide a moment of pause and tie loose ends together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5RVBIm_muc

Butterflies

Photographed in a house in Brixton - most probably a Morpho

Freeman Dyson, end. Chap 1, 'Infinite in all Directions'

"This quick tour of the universe will begin with superstrings and end with butterflies. There will be a couple of intermediate stops on the way. Like Dante on his tour of the Inferno, I find at each level some colorful characters to add human interest to an otherwise intimidating scene. I will not explain what butterflies and superstrings are. To explain butterflies is unnecessary because everyone has seen them. To explain superstrings is impossible because nobody has seen them. But please do not think I am trying to mystify you. Superstrings and butterflies are examples illustrating two different aspects of the universe and two different notions of beauty. Super-strings come at the beginning and butterflies at the end because they are extreme examples. Butterflies are at the extreme of concreteness, superstrings at the extreme of abstraction. They mark the extreme limits of the territory over which science claims jurisdiction. Both are, in their different ways, beautiful. Both are, from a scientific point of view, poorly understood. Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing concern to scientists. Almost all the things scientists think and dream about are mysterious...................

The last stop on our tour of the universe brings us back to my home in Princeton. We have descended from sky to earth, from abstract and speculative theories to the world of everyday reality. My youngest daughter came back from a music camp in Massachusetts carrying some Monarch caterpillars in a jar. She found them feeding on milkweed near the camp. We also have milkweed growing in Princeton and so she was able to keep the caterpillars alive. After a few days they stopped feeding, hung themselves up by their tails and began to pupate. The process of pupation is delightful to watch. They squeeze themselves up into the skin of the pupa, like a fat boy wriggling into a sleeping bag that is three sizes too small for him. At the beginning you cannot believe that the caterpillar will ever fit inside, and at the end it turns out that the sleeping bag was exactly the right size.

Two or three weeks later the butterflies emerge. The emergence is even more spectacular than the pupation. Out of the sleeping bag crawls the bedraggled remnant of the caterpillar, much reduced in size and with wet black stubs for wings. Then, in a few minutes, the body dries, the legs and antennae stiffen and the wings unfurl. The bedraggled little creature springs to life as a shimmering beauty of orange and white and black. We set her free in a nearby field and she flies high over the trees, disappearing into the sky. We hope that the move from Massachusetts to Princeton will not have disrupted the pattern of her autumn migration. With luck she will find companions to share with her the long journey to the Southwest. She has a long way to go, most of it against the prevailing winds.

The world of biology is full of miracles, but nothing I have seen is as miraculous as this metamorphosis of the Monarch caterpillar. Her brain is a speck of neural tissue a few millimeters long, about a million times smaller than a human brain. With this almost microscopic clump of nerve cells she knows how to manage her new legs and wings, to walk and to fly, to find her way by some unknown means of navigation over thousands of miles from Massachusetts to Mexico. How can all this be done? How are her behavior patterns programmed first into the genes of the caterpillar and then translated into the neural pathways of the butterfly? These are mysteries which our biological colleagues are very far from having understood. And yet, we can be confident that we are on the way toward understanding. Progress is rapid in all the necessary disciplines: biochemistry, genetics, embryology, cytology and neurophysiology. Within twenty or fifty years, we will probably be able to read the message that is written in the DNA of the caterpillar. Then we will see in detail how this message is able to direct the formation of a pupa, of legs and wings, and of a brain capable of long-range navigation. Before long, all these marvels of biochemical technology will be within our grasp. And we shall then be able, if we so choose, to apply the technology of the butterfly to our own purposes.

That is the end of our tour. I have given you brief glimpses of four pieces of the universe with which I have to deal as a scientist. First, the superstrings, our latest attempt to impose a deep mathematical unity on the laws of physics. Second, the black holes, the conceptual laboratories in which we play with the structure of space and time. Third, the Oort Cloud, and the comet showers which we imagine guiding the evolution of life on our planet. Fourth, the Monarch butterfly, which flies up into the summer sky, over the trees and far away, a symbol of evanescent beauty and a living proof that nature's imagination is richer than our own."

Vladimir and Vera Nabokov and a drawing by Nabokov  

The lepidopterist and writer, Vladimir Nabokov said of the gap between science and art:

'a mere dimple of a ditch that a small frog could straddle'.

 A fleeting 45 second film: 'butterflies are like ideas'.  One touch and they are gone.