Jiggling Atoms: The Art of Physics

Particle physicists may often feel like their lives are part of a game of chance: A roll of the dice determines whether they will find the data they need to discover the Higgs particle--or whether their accelerator will even run at all. Nonetheless, the fun of the chase to uncover the nature of reality is worth it. That's the take of particle physicist Ben Still at Queen Mary University, London and artist Natalie Kay-Thatcher, at least. Together they have designed a board game, "Race for the Higgs", that captures some of the luck involved in scientific discoveries.

The board game is one of many pieces of physics-based art that were on show at the Jiggling Atoms exhibition in London, earlier this month. Paintings, sculptures, models, comic strips, and sound pieces were also on display. Some of the artists who contributed to the exhibition, and the physicists who ran a lecture series to introduce them to some advanced concepts in quantum theory and particle physics, were kind enough to speak to me about the goals of this science-art collaboration, which was originally conceived by Kay-Thatcher, for the October 2012 podcast.

Physics can be such an abstract, mathematical science, that it's often difficult for physicists themselves to visualize the concepts they use everyday in their research. Is it possible to have a clear picture of a wavefunction, for instance? We often talk about ideas that are in tension--objects that behave as both waves and particles, for instance--and which defy our intuition. (See, for instance, "Time Dilation Gets a Quantum Twist.") So perhaps, physics, more than the other sciences, is ideally suited for interpretation by artists, who earn their crust by by striving to bring out the hidden essence of their subjects.

Artist Penny Klein chose to tackle competing and contradictory views of the atom. She painted two versions of the same hilltop and lakeside landscape: The first represents the chaotic quantum randomness that governs the atom, while the second, is a more ordered visualization that encourages you to contemplate the mathematical structure of physical laws underpinning objects. Her two pieces complement each other, lying on either side of the quantum-classical divide. You can listen to her describing what inspired her on the podcast.

Others chose to represent the act of doing physics itself. One of the defining features of the scientific method, which struck artist Peter Nencini, is that it is an ongoing endeavor, creating a continuing body of knowledge, with old ideas giving way to new, in light of experimental evidence. At the start of the exhibition, Nencini's installation consisted of 12 empty pegboards, hung along a wall. Each day, Nencini continued to listen to introductory physics lectures by Still and others (which are available on the Jiggling Atoms website), and added pieces to the pegboards to reflect what he had learned. He also talks about his evolving piece of art on the podcast.

Historically, this aspect of science has at times clashed with religion because it challenges the acceptance of given truths. In one of my favorite pieces, artist Zeel tells the story of one of the lesser known figures at the centre of one of such conflict: Menocchio, a medieval Italian miller who read 11 books during his life and pondered about how the world came into being. His unconventional views on cosmology--including the notion that angels were created from the bulk of earth, air, fire and water, like worms emerging from rotting cheese--led to him being put on trial for heresy and burned at the stake. Zeel delightfully models his figure along with cheese and worms, flanked by two more famous thinkers, astronomers Galileo Galilei and Giordarno Bruno, who also clashed with the Church. (String theorist and FQXi-member Brian Greene, among others, has compared the multiverse to swiss cheese; so Menocchio, despite being a peasant rather than a scientist, may have been on to something!) Zeel's work celebrates this capacity for human ingenuity and wittily compares his "cheese and worms" cosmology with modern scientific views in a vibrant cartoon that accompanies the sculpture. The artist notes that Galileo and Bruno would probably not have been aware of Menocchio. I like to think that if they were alive today, all three could each have entered the FQXi essay contest, Questioning the Foundations, and debated their ideas on this site.

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The Jiggling Atoms exhibition ran from 1 - 7 October 2012, in London, UK. Visit jigglingatoms.org for more information about the artists involved.