The Disintegration of the Moon; Art & Jazz Meet Physics; (Reverse) Debates on Consciousness; & more…from the 5th FQXi Meeting

While you weren't looking, more content from FQXi's 5th International meeting in Banff has started to trickle through, including a bit more audio and a lot more video. Thanks for your patience.

First up, Brendan Foster and I recorded a special edition of the podcast in Banff on creativity and science. We were lucky enough to be joined by science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who chatted about how he came up with the idea for his latest bestseller, Seveneves--a story about the aftermath of the moon's disintegration--and how authors tread the line between respecting established science and pushing into more speculative realms.

We also spoke with artist Jayne Tollaksen, who recently ran an art-physics program at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. This involved co-creating a series of portraits of various physicists (and FQXi members), in which the physicists themselves took an active role in producing the pieces. The image on the top right is a portrait of Francesca Vidotto, by Tollaksen and Vidotto. You can hear Tollaksen talking about how these portraits were made, and the influence they had on the physicists who took part--providing the scientist with new insights into their modes of thinking, the creative process, and their physics research. At the end of the collaboration, each physicist was invited to describe their experiences. Here are Vidotto's words, written for the project:

My hands are offering you my collaboration and all my passion for the mysteries of the universe. From my hands, my craftsmanship, a whole universe can take shape. In the theory I work with, Loop Quantum Gravity, the whole universe collapses and then bounces back into the expanding universe that we observe today. The geometry at the bounce is a quantum geometry, described mathematically 聽by a net of lines connecting the quanta of spacetime. Modeling the shape of the universe requires craftsmanship--a mathematical craftsmanship--but comes always first from a vision, very much in the same way of an artistic creation.

Also joining the discussion were a couple of FQXi's favorite physicist-musicians, Stephon Alexander and Ian Durham. (Brendan is a musician too.) Alexander, a cosmologist and jazz saxophonist, recently published a terrific book--part popular physics, part musical memoir--called The Jazz of Physics. One connection between the two disciplines that Alexander highlights is the importance of improvisation, something we commonly associate with jazz, but perhaps don't normally think of in terms of the everyday workings of physicists.

Having pondered the links between art, music and science, the next natural question for me was whether we can (and should) change the way that physics and science is taught in schools and universities, to embrace the creative process more openly. One theme that Durham, Alexander and Tollaksen all came back to was the importance of making mistakes in order to progress, and how we need to give students space to "fail" --because this is such a crucial part of the creative learning process. What are your thoughts?

Even at the professional level, scientists often feel stifled and lack the confidence to put forward ideas that may, at first, seem absurd, for fear of appearing ridiculous. Of course, FQXi is always happy to help scientists get comfortable with being laughed at. As a case in point, I'll leave you with a video of a debate on consciousness between philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers, who formulated the "hard problem of consciousness" (the problem of explaining how we have phenomenal experiences), and physicist Carlo Rovelli, who takes a more materialistic stance. Here they are arguing about the role of consciousness in physics, but with a twist: Chalmers and Rovelli must passionately argue their opponents' position, as if it were their own--while wearing bear hats and carrying hockey sticks.

Enjoy!

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