Imagine you are an alien. You follow beams of diffracted light. A distant celestial object exuding white light. Thousands of Kelvins of blackbody radiation hitting thousands of fine wires. You see those pure spectral colors. You feel their mathematically exact intensities. You squint, and you tune in on – what we call – Red. We…
Category: Art
I create Found Poetry of my own science articles and of internet search terms. Inspired by the magic of the math underlying theoretical physics, I craft digital art and drawings.
Dystopic Diffraction – ChatGPT and Poetry
I have been creating Found Poetry from search terms, from spam comments, from my own articles. I’ve followed strict rules and constraints. The stricter, the better. I am removing my consciousness as a human being from the creative process (Not my subconsciousness though!). Turning myself into a paper shuffling office clerk, feeding prompts to an…
Stargate of Diffraction. Escaping the Labyrinth of Colorful Wires.
This blog has been many things. Experimental poetry playground, notes from the field by a small business owner, popular science and tech blog, compilation of dry research reports, self-referential musing of a web developer. The only intersection between all of this has been me being interested & invested in it. I had tech-blogged myself into…
Alien Patent Art
Alien is the seed word – feed into Google Patents search. I am searching for alien patents filed between 1900 and 1910. I pick an image from the first patent found, when listing by date ascending. I multiply the image, invert it, color it, and place the series on my favorite black ground. I pick…
The Origin of Darkness
Where does it come from? Why and when did my physics/math/engineering art decide to only dwell on black backgrounds? I am sure there are proper theories in the history of art. I can come up with some armchair psychologist’s explanations – blaming popular culture, clichés, a collage of archetypical memories. I am hacker. We hackers…
Electromagic ~~~ Appeal of Antique Scientific Instruments
A collage of images and a collage of words. The images are public domain technical drawings related to electromagnetism. The lines of the poem are my prompts, followed by phrases from the first Google search results prompted by it. ~~~ Electromagic explore the illuminating history seamless and unforgettable Metal and Wood memory building work…
No Loose Ends
I don’t like loose ends. But my physics/math art curves have often been cut off, like fraying fabric. I have tried to let them taper off smoothly, letting them fade in the dark, but I would prefer closed lines. The real and imaginary towers have flat roofs. When using software, I tilt the structures, so…
Imperfect Projections
___________________ _______ __ _ _ __ _______ ___________________ Imperfect Projections dissolve the inherent rectangularity dedifferentiating the materials used dependent on the subjective attitudes create interventions change the landscape of the city with a highlight of the spatial dimension a broad utility as a datum for the objective consideration engineers who are responsible resolve multiple objectives…
Field Lines and Potentials – Reality and Imagination Reloaded
I am creating Physics Art very much like I create Found Poetry. I need tough constraints, silly rules, and tools not designed for art. In a world of perfect renderings and deep fakes, I restrict myself to programming parametric curves. Just lines. There are millions of beautiful parametric functions you could choose from. So, I…
They Shall Shine in the Dark
On February 24 I wrote: They shall shine in the dark. I use this sentence as a seed for Twitter search poetry – interlacing poetry with temperature waves again . ~ ~~ ~~~ ~~~~ They shall shine in the dark The interstellar void going down much faster determined to take over under renewed attack under…
Plural Form
Take a figure of a historical patent, meticulously drawn before there was software. It’s a Plural Grating Spectrograph. Wonder about the appeal of antique technical drawings. So modest, so sublime. Copy it, multiply it. Slowly rotate the color wheel, until the purples meet the reds again. This is an impossible spectrum. There are no purples…
Found Prose: Retrospective 2012-2022
You will not want to read this. Nobody does, me included. But creating it has been an interesting experiment. I have been scouring this blog for sentences, one from each blog post. In chronological order, starting in 2012. I had permitted myself to re-order sentences, but I have rarely used that option. The fountain pen…
Loops Near the surface. Lumped Together in Space.
There was a time, when most articles here looked like lab reports or chapters of a thesis. Occasionally, there was a weird poem thrown in. Now is the time for art only, and the thesis-like postings provide for raw material. Temperature waves beneath the ground, driven by the oscillation of the temperature on the surface…
Lone Black Telephone
It’s a relic of the Cold War era. It is black. Once shiny Bakelite became dull. Maybe it was the chemicals. It found shelter in a darkroom. In a research center dismantling its nuclear reactor. There was no future for nuclear science after the iron curtain had crumbled. It was voiceless, robbed of its carbon…
True Colors
I have picked two colors. They shall shine in the dark. ~~~ Another version of my series Reality and Imagination. I used artistic license when tweaking the color values.
Jellyfish of Diffraction
Diffraction patterns, again. But this time I tack them to an imaginary semi-circular screen. Screens grow bigger in radius with increasing wavelength – growing more reddish. If every wavelength would be diffracted in the same way, all peaks would lie on a radius of the circle. But as red is diffracted more, maxima move to…
Creative Process. Evolution.
My creative process has been evolving gradually in the past year. ~ I am thinking about a little piece of physics, and how it is described with math. ~ Then I am creating a SageMath notebook (plus custom code) that outputs a set of functions as parametric curves in a three-dimensional space. Here, diffraction patterns…
Newton’s Space Probes Investigate my Ribbons of Diffraction
I have been calculating diffraction patterns for visible light. Curves are displaced to turn the whole structure into a wavy ribbon built from colored wires or threads. I have turned these images into collages, adding Isaac Newton’s drawings from Opticks (1704). The more I moved Newton’s figures around, and the more I twisted the ribbons…
Celestial Boosted Poetry
A poem from my last physics posts! I have picked unedited snippets from one post, starting at the bottom and moving up, then switching to the other post and again sifting through it from bottom to top. Lines must not be rearranged: the order is dictated by the order in which snippets appeared in the…
Transforming the Celestial Sphere
A spherical spaceship swooshes by at 99% of the speed of light. What will it look like? Squashed because of Lorentz contraction – like an ellipsoid? No. The outline of a moving sphere will remain spherical. Roger Penrose explained this first in 1958 – 50 years after Einstein’s formulation of the theory of special relativity….
Boosted
I have been playing with the geometry of special relativity again! The light cone signifies the invariance of the speed of light. There is a notion of length in four-dimensional spacetime, defined as c2t2 – x2 – y2 – z2. Surfaces of constant length are 4-dimensional hyperboloids. Light rays are null rays, as light travels…
Complex Alien Eclipse
My colorful complex function lived in a universe of white light. I turned off the light. Turned it into its negative. Expected it to look bleak. Like thin white bones on black canvas, cartoon skeletons of imaginary alien creatures. But it is more like the total solar eclipse I watched in 1999. There is interference,…
Trapped inside the Light Cone
Trapped inside the light cone on a path of eerie fire. Causally connected to your past . . Onward. Celestial spheres embrace the future cone gather round your burning self.
Familiar Wave. Come to Rescue.
A poem from text snippets of my last three posts, interlaced with a metamorphosis of my last drawing. ~ ~~ ~~~ The familiar wave is in the middle, oblique. accessible to intuitive interpretation. To tame it, sort of, come to rescue Or are they? Going from up to down you only care about directions What…
Joys of Geometry
Creating figures with math software does not feel like fabricating illustrations for science posts. It is more of a meditation on geometry. I want to literally draw every line. I am not using grid lines or rendered surfaces. I craft a parametric curve for every line. A curve is set of equations. Yet, playing with…
Spins, Rotations, and the Beauty of Complex Numbers
This is a simple quantum state … |➚> = α|↑> + β|↓> … built from an up |↑> state and a down state |↓>. α and β are complex numbers. The result |➚> is in the middle, oblique. The oblique state is a superposition or the up and down base states. Making a measurement, you…
Galaxies of Diffraction
These – the arrangement of points in the image below – are covectors, sort of. I wrote about them, some time ago. They are entities dual to vectors. Eating vectors, spitting out numbers. Vectors are again ‘co’ to vectors; they will eat covectors. If vectors live in a space with axes all perpendicular to each…
Elliptical Poetry
look at these towers Using the map creating a distorted image projected up to the sphere All connecting rays follow this rule Imaginary number i makes an appearance that borders on the poetic It’s nothing more than a whisper construct the proof for yourself something of a dying art avoid thinking about anything there has…
My Elliptical Cone
I’ve still been thinking about this elliptical cone! It has been the main character in my geometric proof on stereographic projection mapping circles to circles. The idea has been to reduce a three-dimensional problem to a two-dimensional one, by noting that something has to be symmetric. A circle on a sphere is mapped to some…
Circles to Circles
Using stereographic projection, you create a distorted image of the surface of a sphere, stretched out to cover an infinite plane. Each point on the sphere is mapped to a point in the equatorial plane by a projection ray starting at a pole of the sphere. Draw a circle on the sphere, e.g. by intersecting…
elkemental Force 