Here in New York for a collaboration meeting and, soon, Thanksgiving. Aside from old friends, fine food (and the exchange rates), a highlight was MOMA’s Martin Puryear exhibit, and, particularly, “Ladder for Booker T. Washington”:
Next up, the Auger observatory, cosmic rays, and the GZK Cutoff. And maybe Sesame Street and my new iPhone.
Andreas Gursky, arguably the most famous contemporary photographer (and inarguably the most well-remunerated one, after a recent $3 million sale) has a new show at London’s White Cube Mason’s Yard Gallery. Gursky creates large-scale pictures of various aspects of modern life — apartment buildings, agriculture, shopping. He digitally manipulates and combines individual photos to give amazing depth of field and level of detail for everything he shows. The new show is dominated by pictures of a colorful celebration from Pyongyang, North Korea, the totalitarian system mirrored in the thousands of synchronized dancers, spectators holding up cards making individual pixels showing pictures of flowers and doves — or guns. But amongst the politics is a picture called Kamiokande:
Kamiokande, 2007, 222 x 357 cm,
© Andreas Gursky/DACS. Courtesy of Monika Sprüth/Philomene Magers, via Wallpaper (more photos — needless to say these immense and detailed pictures don’t reproduce at all well in the relatively few low-quality pixels available here).
Kamiokande is actually Kamioka-NDE — Kamioka Nucleon Decay Experiment: an immense tank of water located in Kamioka, Japan, outfitted with phototubes (the golden spheres), buried deep underground. It was originally built to detect the light given off by the decay of the protons in the water’s hydrogen and oxygen nuclei. However, the experimenters also realized that they would be able to see the products of neutrinos traversing the tank and, rarely, interacting with the water atoms. The main source of neutrinos was meant to be the reactions powering the sun, although in fact the first obvious detections came just 20 years ago from Supernova 1987a. Since then, Kamiokande has indeed observed solar neutrinos, thereby providing the first strong evidence that neutrinos do indeed have a small mass — and sharing the 2002 Nobel.
To get a sense of the immense scale of this experiment, look at the splotches floating on lower right. Those are technicians, paddling around in boats on the surface of the water filling the tank. Their work has been crucial over the last few years: back in 2001, thousands of the phototubes imploded, probably starting with a single one, the shock of that cascading through the structure in a chain reaction. Fortunately, they were able to replace the broken tubes, and for the last few years have been running a slightly different experiment, K2K, an oscillation experiment similar to MINOS and MiniBooNE, which I’ve discussed previously here and, more recently, here.
These experiments are somewhat typical of modern Big Science — huge pieces of hardware (albeit mostly empty in this case), international collaboration taking years to measure the lightest particles we’ve found. And the photo is typical Gursky — humans dwarfed by their own inventions, although more happily than his photos of Pyongyang rallies for the Dear Leader, or of apartment-dwellers dwarfed by their own houses.
My favorite small museum is the Tenement Museum down in New York’s Lower East Side. It was built in the late 19th Century, housing a steady stream of immigrants until it was boarded up in the middle of the 20th. Different apartments in the building have been recreated as they might have been during different decades of the building’s history, and as it was left in 1935.
At first, the tenement housed Irish Catholics, then, European Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, and, finally, Italian Catholics. There is a list of the building’s tenants, and when I visited I found that the last names of all of my grandparents — the common Jewish names of Levy, Cohen, Greenberg and Jaffe — were all represented. There’s no evidence that any of my relations ever lived there, but the stories are familiar: escaping persecution in the old world and searching for success in the new one, a short stay in a tenement, before moving onto a more stable existence in an established immigrant community (for example, Pelham Parkway in the Bronx in my father’s parents case). And then, for their children, a move to the suburbs to raise the next generation — including me.
But the Tenement Museum has a larger presence than just its physical location. The immigrants haven’t stopped coming, and neither has the museum. It sponsors the Digital Artist in Residence Project (DARP). The wonderful and fun Folk Songs for the Five Points collects music and found sounds from the still-immigrant neighborhood and lets you mix and match the sounds to create contemporary folk songs, and soak yourself in the noises of the Lower East Side in 2007.
Maybe we should start a Cosmological Pynchon Book Club…
And I’ve also got Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land if I make it through all 1000+ pages of this.
Last year, musician, artist, polymath and all-around sweet guy Jem Finer built a radio telescope in the Parks in Oxford. This year, funded by an award from the PRS Foundation for New Music, he’s looking in the opposite direction: he’s dug a well in the King’s Wood, in Kent (Southeast England) and made it into a giant, wonderful musical instrument: Score for a Hole in the Ground. Or perhaps it’s a whole orchestra, playing itself. Its tulip-like horn set in the usually secluded woodland was as wonderful to look at as the burbling sounds were to hear — even when nobody is in the forest. When I was there, last weekend, there were plenty of people there, drowning out the music except when you listened carefully, so I look forward to returning on a still autumn day.
I’m recently back from my vacation in Bilbao. Aside from the usual “getting away from it all”, the first highlight was the amazing pintxos—Basque tapas like squid-and-ink croquettes and piles of jamon iberico. With a full tummy, I could handle Frank Gehry’s spectacular Guggenheim Bilbao, one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Sheathed in somehow billowing titanium, the museum floats next to the river, but after you get used to its undoubted weirdness, you immediately see it as part of the cityscape, with people seated at the cafes that surround it, others jogging past, kids playing in the waterjets that serve as a fountain undifferentiated from the plaza around it. Inside, the glass, limestone and steel give it the beauty of a cathedral but without the hushed tones.
Also inside, permanently installed in a football-field-sized gallery (amusingly sponsored by steelmakers Arcelor), is Richard Serra’s “The Matter of Time”, a collection of the sculptor’s Torqued Ellipses, Spirals, and Snakes. Curving sections of reddened core-ten steel, the biggest problem with the display is that you’re not allowed to touch it, when what you really want to do is rub your entire body against the plates (apologies if that’s more about me than you wanted to know).
In news about another kind of big iron, the US National Energy Research Supercomputer Center has chosen Cray to supply its next major machine. Cray, absorbed into Silicon Graphics in 1996 at the start of the last tech boom/bubble, was sold off again in 2000, making ‘supercomputers’ since the early 70s, produced the fondly-remembered T3E in the 90s, back when supercomputing was largely in support of science and engineering (as opposed to serving web pages). The new system will have almost 20,000 dual-core processors, but what matters if you’re doing science (or at least the kind that I’m most interested in), is the way that those processors are wired together: we don’t want to do 20,000 individual calculations; we need to do one calculation that’s 20,000 times too big to fit on one machine. To date, NERSC has probably supported more CMB-related supercomputing than anywhere else, and we all hope that the new machine will enable us to do even more, in particular to analyze data from coming experiments like the Planck Surveyor.
This morning I found what is undoubtedly one of the weirdest papers ever to appear on the arXiv, “Ettore Majorana: quantum mechanics of destiny”, by O. B. Zaslavskii. On the one hand, it’s a short retelling of the life of Ettore Majorana, a major figure in the development of mid-20th-Century particle physics. On the other, it’s a weird structural/semiotic analysis of Majorana’s life in the context of his work on quantum mechanics. That is, not an analysis of his work, but an analysis of his life as if it were a quantum-mechanical system!
Majorana is remembered nowadays for his work on the fundamental properties of particles, in particular neutrinos and the equations that can describe them. If neutrinos are their own antiparticles, they are called Majorana neutrinos (otherwise they are Dirac neutrinos, after the British physicist who wrote down another possible set of equations that describe particles like electrons which are different from their antiparticles). But he is also known for having disappeared in the late 1930s under so-called “mysterious circumstances”.
The paper makes the claim that Majorana’s disappearance was an example of his applying the logic of quantum mechanics to his own life (and death) — superposition, probability, uncertainty. If artists live their lives as works of art, why shouldn’t scientists live theirs as if they embodied their scientific ideas? Or at least, why can’t the historian use quantum mechanics as an interpretive structure for understanding the past? (Like, say, Freudian and Marxist literary criticism, or, more recently, the application of Darwinian evolution to literary theory — although “it would be pointless and, indeed, comical to base literary criticism on quantum mechanics, string theory, or general relativity” according to this article on Darwinian criticism.)
Well, I am all for breaking down the barriers between the two cultures…
The aliens are taking over London:
(Actually, this is a picture of one of Theo Jansen’s Strandbeesten, encamped in London for the summer, courtesy of the ICA.)
And this must be the mothership:
(And this is the summer’s Serpentine Pavilion, designed by architect Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond of Ove Arup.)
I’m just back from New York, remembering life back in the US-of-A for a week or so. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time reading the New York Times; for all the very real problems it’s shown on the news side over the last few years, its feature writing retains an amazing breadth and depth, combined with an unwillingness to differentiate between so-called highbrow and lowbrow culture.
Despite having always abjured the comics page that’s a staple of most other American newspapers, the Times has started The Funny Pages in its Sunday Magazine. Last year, they presented Chris Ware’s “Building Stories”, and now they’re giving us “La Maggie La Loca,” updating Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets. Maggie Chascarillo, a punk-rock chick from East LA when the comic started back in 1982, now aged a quarter-century like the rest of us. Now she’s off adventuring somewhere in Central or South America with former pro-wrestling Rena Titanon. Well, not really adventuring anymore — Maggie (and Hernandez) has long ago given up the sci-fi/magical-realist trappings that gave the series its name, in favor of real life.
Other good stuff in the Times over the past week:
Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day that Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in 1904.
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