Science and Art

Two short articles today on the web. One is a short profile about a former Summer Undergraduate Laboratory Intern (SULI) summer intern who has done very well for himself. I did that a couple of weeks ago when stories were very slow…

The second is much cooler. It’s a short piece, with a killer photo I might add, that describes a barbecue held on-site yesterday. The Mexican-style meats, rice, stuffed peppers, grilled tortillas, and mmmmmmmmmmm it smelled amazing!

Later yesterday afternoon, I went and sat in on a meeting between the director of SLAC, Jonathan Dorfan, and a local artist originally from Australia named Lylie Fisher, who recently had an art display in one of the buildings on site for several months.

I now regret never having made it over to that building to look at all of her pieces, because they are gorgeous. And they're also very interesting because they used photographs taken from physics research four decades old.

Bubble chambers use superheated, pressurized liquid that cause particles passing through to leave behind bubbly trails that are then captured by cameras. The resulting picture looks a lot like computer produced events of today's particle detectors, except they are actual pictures of trails left by particles and not just recreations on a screen.

Fisher took enlargements of these photos, cropped them, and painted directly on the photo with acrylic paints. The colors are bright, vibrant, and I love them. You can read more about her work and look at some of the pieces at her website here, or on SLAC Today here, or on Symmetry magazine here (this last one has lots of great images).

Anyways, they got into a long conversation about science and art, about how they both explore different sides of the same coin. Particle physics asks, "Why are we here?" by investigating the very essence of how matter is created, while art takes the philosophical approach. Fisher said her goal was to combine these two elements into single pieces of art that would not only generate thoughts about existence, but raise interest in physics.

I think its interesting that so many scientists at SLAC have artistic backgrounds, whether in music or in art, and so many have deep appreciations for the arts. It would be a great initiative to find some way of combining the two in schools throughout the country. Sadly, with art programs disappearing every year, this probably won't happen. But one can always hope for a future push, because they really are not all that dissimilar.