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Many plays about science suffer from trying to do too much, telling a story while teaching science, but Nick Payne’s two-hander “Constellations”, now on at the Royal Court Theatre in London, has science and a scientist at its center, adding to the drama, not distracting us with jargon or science fictional twists.

“Constellations” is the story of Roland and Marianne, a beekeeper and a cosmologist. Without giving away too many spoilers, I’ll say that the play tells us the story of their relationship, as it might play out in the myriad possible universes of the multiverse, each one subtly different from the rest (while of course there would be vastly many more that are not subtly, but radically, different — but a play about empty, boring Universes would be less compelling). In one, Marianne tells Roland “I sit in front of the computer all day and analyse data from the Cosmic Microwave Background” which readers will know is pretty much exactly what I do. In others, she is still an astrophysicist, sometimes more theoretical, sometimes more observational (or she is the same, just choosing to highlight different parts of her work to impress Roland or drive him away). Sometimes we see their relationship end, sometimes continue, sometimes restart, as the play pushes forward in time and between the universes. And we return, repeatedly, to one particular version of their story, towards a climax in the future of one or more of the Universes, which puts the comedy of many of the situations into tragic relief.

Playwright Nick Payne needs one of his characters to be a scientist, able to describe the underlying ideas, but manages to avoid too much heavy-handed exposition, limiting the explicit discussion of cosmology to flirty conversations early on in their relationship (I don’t know about my peers, but I find cosmology very good for flirting, at least with the right people). Sally Hawkins’ Marianne and Rafe Spall’s Roland are improbably attractive but manage to get across at least some of the neediness and nerdiness of someone burrowed so deeply into both the technical problems and the broad themes of something like cosmology or beekeeping, making us care about them and their fate (or fates?).

Thanks to my Sussex University colleagues Andrew Liddle and Kathy Romer, who both acted as consultants for the play, for inviting me along to see this excellent production.

I spent a quick couple of days last week at the The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing meeting in Madrid.

The topic of the meeting was indeed the question of “hypothesis testing”, which I addressed in a post a few months ago: how do you choose between conflicting interpretations of data? The canonical version of this question was the test of Einstein’s theory of relativity in the early 20th Century — did the observations of the advance of the perihelion of Mercury (and eventually of the gravitational lensing of starlight by the sun) match the predictions of Einstein’s theory better than Newton’s? And of course there are cases in which even more than a scientific theory is riding on the outcome: is a given treatment effective? I won’t rehash here my opinions on the subject, except to say that I think there really is a controversy: the purported Bayesian solution runs into problems in realistic cases of hypotheses about which we would like to claim some sort of “ignorance” (always a dangerous word in Bayesian circles), while the orthodox frequentist way of looking at the problem is certainly ad hoc and possibly incoherent, but nonetheless seems to work in many cases.

Sometimes, the technical worries don’t apply, and the Bayesian formalism provides the ideal solution. For example, my colleague Daniel Mortlock has applied the model-comparison formalism to deciding whether objects in his UKIDSS survey data are more likely to be distant quasars or nearby and less interesting objects. (He discussed his method here a few months ago.)

In between thoughts about hypothesis testing, I experienced the cultural differences between the statistics community and us astrophysicists and cosmologists, of which I was the only example at the meeting: a typical statistics talk just presents pages of text and equations with the occasional poorly-labeled graph thrown in. My talks tend to be a bit heavier on the presentation aspects, perhaps inevitably so given the sometimes beautiful pictures that package our data.

On the other hand, it was clear that the statisticians take their Q&A sessions very seriously, prodded in this case by the word “controversy” in the conference’s title. In his opening keynote, Jose Bernardo up from Valencia for the meeting discussed his work as a so-called “Objective Bayesian”, prompting a question from the mathematically-oriented philosopher Deborah Mayo. Mayo is an arch-frequentist (and blogger) who prefers to describe her particular version as “Error Statistics”, concerned (if I understand correctly after our wine-fuelled discussion at the conference dinner) with the use of probability and statistics to criticise the errors we make in our methods, in contrast with the Bayesian view of probability as a description of our possible knowledge of the world. These two points of view are sufficiently far apart that Bernardo countered one of the questions with the almost-rude but definitely entertaining riposte “You are bloody inconsistent — you are not mathematicians.” That was probably the most explicit almost-personal attack of the meeting, but there were similar exchanges. Not mine, though: my talk was a little more didactic than most, as I knew that I had to justify the science as well as the statistics that lurks behind any analysis of data.

So I spent much of my talk discussing the basics of modern cosmology, and applying my preferred Bayesian techniques in at least one big-picture case where the method works: choosing amongst the simple set of models that seem to describe the Universe, at least from those that obey General Relativity and the Cosmological Principle, in which we do not occupy a privileged position and which, given our observations, are therefore homogeneous and isotropic on the largest scales. Given those constraints, all we need to specify (or measure) are the amounts of the various constituents in the universe: the total amount of matter and of dark energy. The sum of these, in turn, determines the overall geometry of the universe. In the appropriate units, if the total is one, the universe is flat; if it’s larger, the universe is closed, shaped like a three-dimensional sphere; if smaller, it’s a three-dimensional hyperboloid or saddle. What we find when we make the measurement is that the amount of matter is about 0.282±0.02, and of dark energy about 0.723±0.02. Of course, these add up to just greater than one; model-selection (or hypothesis testing in other forms) allows us to say that the data nonetheless give us reason to prefer the flat Universe despite the small discrepancy.

After the meeting, I had a couple of hours free, so I went across Madrid to the Reina Sofia, to stand amongst the Picassos and Serras. And I was lucky enough to have my hotel room above a different museum:

Urban Sputnik, our collaboration with Vanessa Harden and Dominic Southgate of Gammaroot Design is currently on display at Imperial College in the main entrance of the Norman Foster-designed business school, located on Exhibition Road in London, just up the street from the Science Museum, the V&A Museum and the Natural History Museum. I’ve discussed the pieces that will be on display before, and if you’re anywhere near South Kensington in London over the next few days, please come and see them.

If that piques your interest, you can hear more from us directly: on Tuesday evening, November 8, we’ll be hosting a short presentation — with drinks and snacks — talking about the creation of the pieces and the science behind them.

I took a bit of time out from the astrophysics this week to head over to the Barbican for the “Watch Me Move” exhibition: more than a hundred years of film and video animation. From an 1880s hand-coloured “Pierrot” and Winsor McCay’s 1911 animated version of his newspaper comic Little Nemo, to Toy Story and superheroes, most of the works took advantage of the medium to depict an unreality reflecting, but not bound by, the same laws as our everyday world.

The highlight was an amazing late-1970s soviet-era film, “Tale of Tales”, beautiful and tragic, a half-hour exploration of memory, childhood, even war. It’s made its way to YouTube in four parts. Here’s the first:

There was Ballet Mécanique, a visually gorgeous kaleidoscopic film from Fernand Léger which mirrored his painting, showing its inspirations in the modern mechanical and optical world. And the Warner Brothers cartoon stable was well-represented by Chuck Jones’ metafictional “Duck Amuck”, with a benighted Daffy tortured through the fourth wall by a malicious animator (who of course turns out to be Bugs Bunny).

I had just recently seen another amazing bit of animation, the fifteen-minute history of the Universe (made in collaboration with quite a few of my astrophysicist colleagues) embedded within Terrence Malick’s ambitious and beautiful Tree of Life, meditating, like the “Tale of Tales”, on life and death, the weight of history, the reverberations of loss.

All of this brought to mind a much sillier, dimly-remembered, old cartoon, a black and white Felix the Cat journeying to the stars. A quick search turned up “Astronomeous”, a wonderful bit of pop-surrealism from 1928:

Urban Sputnik is a new interactive cosmology exhibit currently showing at the Royal Institution. It was created by Vanessa Harden and Dominic Southgate of Gammaroot Design collaborating with some Imperial Astrophysicists: me, Dave Clements and Roberto Trotta. Unlike my other recent foray into the science/art overlap, this one is a bit more didactic (that is, scientifically accurate!)

We’ve designed five different exhibits, and, supported by an award from the STFC, Vanessa and Dominic have made two of them. One tries to show how the shape of the Universe can seem flat up close, but curved due to the mass and energy on the largest scales. Another shows how the expansion of the Universe results in a redshift — light from further away loses energy, changing its wavelength and frequency.

The pieces are on display at the Royal Institution through 29 July, and there’s a closing event on Thursday 28 July where we’ll talk about the exhibit and both the science and design principles behind it (the event is free, but tickets are recommended to be sure you get a seat!).

Last summer, I helped make a (fake) time machine, an exercise in “creative misinterpretation” (in the words of my architect partner, Shin Egashira). This was part of the Beyond Entropy project organized by the Architecture Association — we showed it then in Venice but now Londoners will get a chance to see the work in the AA’s own gallery, opening Friday, 6 May. There will also be a series of events to mark the exhibit, including a night discussing time travel (and, um, shamanism) with Shin and photographer Goswin Schwendinger on May 20.

Update: New Scientist and Nature have reviews of the show.

Also, in a nice bit of synchronicity, the Royal Society is hosting the great Beyond Ourselves exhibition, featuring works by artists including Geraldine Cox, Imperial College Physics’ artist-in-residence. You have to book ahead, but it’s well worth the trip to see her and her colleagues’ fantastic explorations of scientists at work.

Yesterday, I went to visit Longplayer, Jem Finer’s thousand-year composition, for the eleventh anniversary of its first note, played on New Years Day, 1999. Longplayer is currently controlled (performed?) from Trinity Buoy Wharf in London’s simultaneously desolate and overbuilt Docklands, covered in newly built flats and offices, with hardly a human in sight.

Jem started out as a rock’n’roller, but has expanded into broader realms of visual and sonic art, as much interested in the logistics of producing sounds as the sounds themselves; I first got to know him in his role as the artist-in-residence in Oxford’s Astrophysics group where he drew maps, played music, and built — and lived in — a beautiful plywood-and-chicken-wire radio telescope.

Longplayer will take 1000 years to play, but music technology won’t be stable for that long a period (not to mention the sociology-political systems needed to arrange transmissions). Some of these questions have also been taken up by the Long Now Foundation, with which Longplayer has become affiliated. Jem has addressed some of these questions head-on over the last year with a series of Longplayer Live performances at London’s Roundhouse, and in San Francisco, as well as upcoming performances in LA, Tasmania and Porto. Although the main composition is streamed electronically, the live versions are performed on Tibetan singing bowls (which you can sponsor if you want to support the project). Jem has also transmuted the work into “Shortplayer” which uses the same algorithm and notation but is played on more conventional instruments.

Longplayer is stationed in a gorgeous lighthouse on the Thames. As you approach, it resonates with its extended, changing melody.

For the occasion, Jem provided drinks, bagels, and the opportunity to take in the view … …and the music (this is apparently just a temporary amplifier as they recover from a power failure earlier in the year)… (More pictures of Longplayer, Trinity Buoy Wharf, and environs here.)

Of course, the New Year is well-matched to the sort of long-term contemplation that Longplayer encourages. In the US and the rest of the so-called “New World”, the very idea of a thousand years is almost absurdly long — the imprint of humankind on the American continents was radically different in the year that the people there wouldn’t have called 1011. Here in Europe, not to mention Asia, much has changed technologically and politically since then, but the broad outlines of our presence would have been recognisable. But even here, the longest-lasting institutions, such as the Church, have undergone reformations and counter-reformations, sponsored states and wars between states, and certainly couldn’t be trusted to preserve a work of art for its own sake, despite the many things that have happily made their way down to us in 2011. Knowledge, of course, has proven easier to transmit than the works themselves; we can only hope that this remains true in the digital age and the rolling obsolescence of new technologies.

Longplayer is open to the public every weekend (aside from the celebratory drinks and bagels, I assume). And of course you can follow Longplayer on Twitter and, most importantly, listen to the stream anytime, anywhere.

As a scientist, I am used to my work being read by my peers, and I’ve made it into the occasional magazine or newspaper article, and even the odd TV and radio slot. But last week I travelled to Venice’s Architecture Biennale for the culmination of the first phase of the Architectural Association’s Beyond Entropy art/science project (which I’ve described before). I took a vaporetto to the island of San Giorgio, and next to one of Venice’s more spectacular Palladian churches, I saw the Beyond Entropy banner hanging over the entrance:
(I took these pictures, but there are many much more professional ones taken by the AA’s Valerie Bennett.)

Before arriving, I didn’t know what to expect from the project: small-scale, low-key, amateurish? In this setting, it was clearly big and serious. And inside this lovely building were these, the prototypes for our time machine:

Last year I traveled to South America to witness the launch of our several-hundred million-Euro Planck satellite, surely a big and serious project. But the sight of my own work — our texts, flywheels and gyroscopes — sitting on a plywood plinth, plausibly described as something at least related to the very different creative process of art, was nearly as disconcerting (despite the lack of highly explosive rocket fuel).

I’ll leave any assessment of the overall quality to others, although it became obvious that these pieces really are prototypes for what could become more finished works, but we have a long way to go. Nonetheless, let me explicitly thank my collaborators, Shin Egashira (whom I will also congratulate on his wedding which gave him an excellent reason to not show up in Venice) and Scrap Marshall, a student at the Architectural Association who joined us toward the end of the project and did an enormous amount of practical and creative work getting our pieces together. From speaking to members of  some of the other groups, we were lucky to all be based in London, and to eventually come to see our project in similar ways, albeit from different directions; some of the more widely-dispersed groups had to deal with significantly greater practical problems, and the interpersonal ones those ended up causing.

That first day was dedicated to the AA’s visiting school, and the next day was the centrepiece: a marathon symposium of more than thirty talks, dedicated to the themes of “entropy” and “energy”. Remarkably, none of our projects addressed the ecological, societal and political aspects of these topics, while many of the speakers attacked them directly, from Richard Burdett and Reinier de Graaf’s complementary discussions of the bleak picture for energy and climate if we keep to “business as usual” in our habits of consumption and production, to Italian Green Party politician Grazia Francescato’s hopeful discussion of “Green Jobs and Green Economy”. There were a few talks on science per se, from Angelo Merlina’s brief introduction to the LHC at CERN (of which a third talked about cosmology, and a third was pre-recorded), to one of my favourites, biophysicist Tania Saxl’s description of the amazing mechanism behind the motion of rotating bacterial flagella. There was also an inexplicable prerecorded description of “parallel worlds” in film from de Gruyter and Thys, a performance from the Arazzi Laptop ensemble, and contributions from Serpentine Gallery curator Hans-Ulrik Obrist (which was interesting but mostly about himself) and Charles Jencks. Jencks tackled the overlap between science, art and architecture head-on, each as a different metaphorical system for describing and interacting with the world. This culminates in his Scottish Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a hugely symbolic landscape replete with double helixes and grassy knolls in the form of black hole spacetime diagrams (I admit I’ve also found these supposed metaphors a bit too, well, literal for my taste — with insufficient information to be effective teaching tools, but too didactic to be truly beautiful.) I think the most important thing I learned was that, in their own way, the architects are just as nerdy as us scientists, but just better looking dressed.

Also, there was plenty of fine food and free-flowing sparkling wine (which meant that I probably missed about half of the presentations).

Finally, I would like to thank everyone from the AA who made the project happen (and will continue to do so, if further funding is forthcoming): Artemis Doupa, Sylvie Taher, Esther McLaughlin, Aram Mooradian and most especially the ever-enthusiastic project director, Stefano Rabolli Pansera. Thanks also to the AA visiting students, and all of the other participants, especially Ariel Schlesinger and Wilfredo Prieto for giving me a glimpse of the Architecture Biennale through artists’ eyes.

Two crucial figures from outside the mainstream of American culture have died.

Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) has been hanging around, writing about and stirring up trouble in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1950s as a writer, poet, occasional political activist and rock ‘n’ roller. First in the late 60s and early 70s and occasionally thereafter, he was one of the Fugs (named after the faux-expletive from Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead) singing both the poems of William Blake as well as “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side”. Since then, he kept writing, occasionally reformed the Fugs with his partner Ed Sanders, but had suffered a series of strokes in the last year from which he never fully recovered.

Harvey Pekar (1939-2010) was a bit better known. For the last few decades, he had been writing a series of autobiographical comics, “American Splendor”, illustrated by some of the best comics artists of the last few decades, from R. Crumb and Alan Moore to Gilbert Hernandez, Chester Brown and Joe Sacco.They chronicled his life in Cleveland, Ohio, from the tedium of his day job as a hospital clerk, a bout with cancer (in the excellent graphic novel “Our Cancer Year”), and his occasional run-ins with fame — in the 80s, he was occasional guest on David Letterman’s late-night talk show (until he famously decided to use his slot to lambaste GE, the owner of the NBC television network), and in this decade was memorably played by Paul Giamatti in a movie, also called “American Splendor”, based on the comics. Only a couple of weeks ago, I discovered The Pekar Project, devoted to getting and keeping his newest works online. He was always surly, too high-maintenance for his own good, dependably dissatisfied with whatever his life threw at him. And will nonetheless be missed.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my visit to Geneva as part of the Beyond Entropy art/architecture/science collaboration sponsored by the Architecture Association. We continued our work last weekend in the Dorset woods visiting the AA’s Hooke Park site, a 350-acre forest with a bit more space for workshops than their Bedford Square buildings in central London.

Our group’s brief was to explore the concept of “mechanical energy” and we took as our starting point “How To Build A Time Machine”, by the French pre-absurdist Alfred Jarry (who I remember first encountering as the inspiration behind the name of Cleveland proto-punks Pere Ubu and as an occasional character in Zippy the Pinhead). Like Wells’ Time Machine from the same period, Jarry envisions time as a fourth dimension, and equips a massive cube with giant flywheels. Conservation of angular momentum (real physics) keeps the machine from moving in space, and also in time (that’s the absurdity).

We started by playing with some store-bought gyroscopes, trying to fix them to the faces of a cube, but soon realized that it was difficult to connect the edges of the cube to the axes of the spinning disks, although we did make this lovely machine out of small electric motors, rotors from tape decks, and machined metal disks (where by “we” I must admit that my mechanical prowess doesn’t quite rate much beyond kibbitzing on my part).

But we wanted something more substantial, and more symmetric. The design breakthrough, and my only major contribution, came with the realization that we could join the axes of the flywheels and the corners of the faces of cube with a triangle — a simpler and more stable shape than the cube itself. Shin Egashira, the architectural side of our triangular collaboration, took this forward to an actual design. We cut it from thick plywood with a magnificent CNC machine…

…which we then put together to make this:

The flywheels spin on bearings, and can actually generate quite a bit of angular momentum. We couldn’t yet work out an efficient way to get and keep all three wheels spinning at once, but the whole mechanism is stable (and well-built!) enough to spin around rather amazingly on the ground:

Next, the work of our collaboration and the others in the Beyond Entropy “cluster” will be presented at the Festival dell’energia in Lecce, and then this summer in Venice for the Architecture Biennale. Sadly, we weren’t able to travel in time any faster (or slower) than the usual one second per second, so these events are approaching fast.