Last year I’ve discovered Paddy McAloon’s re-edition of “I Trawl the Megahertz” (published as Prefab Sprout) in happenstance. I was listening to Spotify, and this beautiful instrumental piece showed up, with hesitating strings and a cold voice, which was not too dissimilar to Woodkid’s On Then and Now which I had been drawn to earlier in the season.
This gradually became my favorite album of the year (other great songs are in there, such as I’m 49.) Now that the virus is crawling and the internet functions at the Terahertz speeds, we’ve gone full circle. Continue readingSubluminal
Slower than the speed of light, but not by much
Category Archives: art & science
Light sources around the world
Over the last two years, I had a chance to visit a few synchrotron around the world!
Here’s my fav list:- Best view:@advlightsource
- Best music:@advancedphoton
- Best location:@synchroSOLEIL
- Best architecture: Swiss Light Source @psich_en
- Best interior design:@elettrasincro
- Best food: Taiwan Photon Source #NSRRC
Now I need to visit:
- Diamond Light Source (near Oxford, UK),
- MaxIV (Lund, Sweden) and the
- European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (Grenoble, France)
SOLEIL synchrotron (near Paris, France)
Swiss Light Source (Paul Scherrer Institute, near Zurich)
Taiwan Photon Source (Hsinchu, Taiwan)
Elettra sincotrone (Trieste, Italy) – with Luca Gregoratti
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory (near Chicago, IL) – with Gautam Gunjala (UC Berkeley)
Advanced Light Source Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (near San Francisco, CA) – with Claudi Mazzoli (from NSLS-II, Brookhaven)
Good optics
Here are collected pictures from the vendor exhibition at the SPIE Optics+Photonics 2019 conference in San Diego, CA.
I always find these exhibitions strangely fascinating, and I wanted to capture why. Enjoy!
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Vision+Light
Somehow my art piece has been accepted! A delightful play on the wavelike behavior of light, and the particle0like behavior of silicon atoms, in a tribute to Malevich. Instant Classic!
Incoherent on coherent
You can now see it at the Vision+Light exhibition on Berkeley Campus, from February 20th to March 14th, 2019
Art & Science (X) – Science pictures
Vision, and the means to capture it – photography – plays a momentous role in science.
I was much impressed by a remark of Aldous Huxley, that we owe our civilization largely to the fact that vision is an objective sense. An animal with an olfactory sense or with hearing, however well developed, could never have created science. A smell is either good or bad, and even hearing is never entirely neutral; music can convey emotions with an immediateness of which the sober visual arts are inca pable. No wonder that the very word “objective” has been appropriated by optics.
Dennis Gabor – Light and Information
It is therefore fitting to take a look at all the great pictures that have been recorded by all means.
Here is a selection of scientific picture competitions and galleries you might want to have a look at:
- Nikon Small World (see 2018’s gallery)
- Royal Photographic Society International Images for Science (here’s a 2017 subgallery)
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council photo competition (here’s the 2017 Gallery, the 2016 Gallery)
- Wellcome image awards (here’s the 2017 Gallery)
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Insight Investment Astronomy (see the 2018 gallery)
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JEOL Image Contest (Electronic micrograph competition)
- EIPBN Micrograph contest (scroll down on website)
- Twitter: @SciencePhoto
I found that The Atlantic and The Guardian usually have beautiful galleries.
Astronomy is an obvious domain where picture are breathtaking, but more so is space imaging.
Astronomy is an obvious domain where picture are breathtaking, but more so is space imaging.Here are some amazing pictures from the past few years:
- NASA New Horizon flight over Pluto
- NASA Cassini Mission (moon of Saturn, ref2)
- NASA Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO)
- NASA Juno Mission (and flight over Jupiter)
- ESA Gaia
Art & Science (XI) – Resources in the Bay Area
Here’s a short list of Art & Science resources in the Bay Area.
It is not comprehensive, and I will augment it as I go!
In San Francisco
Grey Area (2665 Mission Street) is a space dedicated to art and technology (lots of VR and visual art.) The Exploratorium (Pier 15) has a lot of very neat experiments that do have an artistic component to them, while the Cal Academy of Science (Golden Gate Park) sometimes run events based on art and technology.
For 2018-2019, the French Embassy is assembling a series of events around arts and science called After Tomorrow. There’s been events at the Cal Academy of Arts and Gray Area, but oftentimes they’re here to promote a French artist, rather than giving a systematic treatment of art and science.
There’s also Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for Art, Science and Technology), which is based in the Bay Area and organizes event, such as the LASER talks, The Convening (for their 50th birthday.)
At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
There is a large source of content at Berkeley Lab, especially given it’s the host of national user facilities:
the Advanced Light Source (x-ray imaging), the Molecular Foundry (electron microscopy), NERSC (computer simulations) and Joint Genome Institute (biology), each with over 1000 users per year from all over the world, and a rich history (including 12 Nobel Prize laureates). Over the past year I’ve tried to consolidate the material available. Here is some things you can find online:
- Berkeley Lab physics photowalk
- 2 Poets and a Particle Accelerator
- Amazing Science Images
- Berkeley Lab Arts & Science
- ALS Science as Art
- Molecular Foundry nano art contest (2018)
- Berkeley Lab instagram has a few pictures
- Bees and Bombs (LBNL’s Dave Whyte)
- The Climate Music Project, led by LBNL’s Bill Collins
- Higgs Boson
- The historical photo archive
I’ve been collecting data (art-at-lbl-gov goes straight to my mailbox,) and I have a bunch of scientific friends who are themselves artist, such as Sinead Griffin. I even ventured into this myself; the following picture was made by superimposing partially coherent light on atomic scale variations of a substrate seen with an x-ray microscope (a tribute to “Suprematist Composition: White on White” by Vladimir Malevich):
Incoherent on Coherent (Antoine Wojdyla, 2015)
I believe there are many cool things in tandem with BAM/PFA or SFMOMA, or even CalPerf: the music venue should try to get closer to what people are doing in the EECS department — and I believe the University of Michigan should do the same with UMS.
I’m not very familiar with what happens at UC Berkeley or Stanford in that field, apart from are a few independent events, such as this one. I would love to invite David Stork, Edward Tufte and others, and I’m sure that there are many ways to bring in other national labs, Bell Labs (Bell Labs researchers basically fled to national labs when things went down, but there seems to be a revival nowadays.)
And there’s of course some art on novel unusual media (silicon wafers or EUV photomasks) that could be used!
Art and science (IX) – Neural networks
This is a continuation of a series of blog posts, written mostly in French, about arts and science
In the past few years, we’ve seen the emergence of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), and the latest developments are Generative Adverserial Networks (GAN), where the goal is to pit two neural networks against each other so that they find the best way to generate an object from a label or a simple drawing, or mimick the style of an artist.The first ripple in the vast ocean of possibility was Deep Dream, though it wasn’t technically a GAN: Now, things have evolved even more, and you can not only generate trippy videos, but also use neural network to emulate the style of an artist and generate from scratch content that is indeed appealing! Continue readingSelf-reference
Self-reference is cornerstone in Hofstadter’s Godel-Escher-Bach, a must read book for anyone interested in logic (and we shall rely logic in these days to stay sane.)
Here’s a bunch of examples of self-reference that I found interesting, curated just for you!Barber’s paradox:The barber is the “one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves.” The question is, does the barber shave himself?
Self-referential figure (via xkcd):
Tupper’s formula that prints itself on a screen (via Brett Richardson)
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Wafer art
My father is an artist, and he recently spent a few weeks in Berkeley, where he had the chance to paint. Since painting on a canvas is boring, I thought he could try to paint on pieces of silicon wafer, which are the principal component for the fabrication of microprocessors, and indeed he did:
Silicone (Romain Wojdyla, 2017)
Le Monde Upside Down II (Romain Wojdyla, 2017)
I was able to salvage an EUV photomask from my lab, which is basically the gold master for engraving these microchips. These surface are extremely precise (down to the atomic level), yet the paint stuck:
Floating Point (Romain Wojdyla, 2017)
There’s also a swath of art in-silico, not too far from David Hockney’s iPad paintings.
Untitled (Romain Wojdyla, 2011)
Happy birthday dad!
(some of his artwork is available here: romain.wojdyla.fr.)Beautiful SEM pictures
I had the chance to help my friend Sylvie to get scanning electron microscope pictures of the MRI contrast agent she synthesizes, and we collected gorgeous data thanks to my colleague Farhad.
He told me that he had TONS of failed experiments that still yielded great pictures…
We should start a journal of the failed experiments… art+science mag !:)
SEM picture that looks like an aerial view of Dog Island (Anguilla)…
I guess there is some wabi-sabi in science…
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