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: Physics
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
Lines and Circles
I poked at complex function 1/z, and its real and imaginary parts look like magical towers. When you look at these towers from above or below, you see sections of perfect circles. This is hinting at some underlying simplicity. Using the map 1/z, another complex number – w=1/z – is mapped to z. Four dimensions…
Reality and Imagination
Grey and colorful. Cutting through each other. Chasing each other. Meeting in the center, leaning on each other, forming an infinite line. ~ Reality and Imagination: Real and imaginary part of complex function 1/z: ~ The real part of 1/z is painted in shades of grey, the imaginary part in rainbow colors. Plots are created…
Vintage Covectors
Covectors in the Dual Space. This sounds like an alien tribe living in a parallel universe hitherto unknown to humans. In this lectures on General Relativity, Prof. Frederic Schuller says: Now comes a much-feared topic: Dual vector space. And it’s totally unclear why this is such a feared topic! A vector feels familiar: three numbers…
Super Motivational Function
I’ve presented a Motivational Function, a while back. It is infinitely flat at the zero point: all its derivatives are zero there. Yet, it manages to lift its head – as it is not analytic at zero! If you think of it as a function of a complex argument, its weirdness becomes more obvious. Turn…
Dirac’s Belt Trick
Is classical physics boring? In his preface to Volume 1 of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman worries about students’ enthusiasm: … They have heard a lot about how interesting and exciting physics is—the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and other modern ideas. By the end of two years of our previous course, many…
Motivational Function
Deadly mutants are after us. What can give us hope? This innocuous-looking function is a sublime light in the dark. It proves you can always recover. If your perseverance is infinite. As x tends to zero, the exponent tends to minus infinity. The function’s value at zero tends to zero. It is a zero value…
Gödel’s Proof
Gödel’s proof is the (meta-)mathematical counterpart of the paradoxical statement This sentence is false. In his epic 1979 debut book Gödel, Escher, Bach Douglas Hofstadter intertwines computer science, math, art, biology with a simplified version of the proof. In 2007 he revisits these ideas in I Am a Strange Loop. Hofstadter writes: … at age…
elkemental Force 