Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

I’ve been in Geneva now for a couple of days. We spent yesterday visiting CERN, trying to inspire the artists, architects and scientists alike (I’ve collaborated with people here, but I’ve never visited before).

You can also check out Peter Coles’ blog for his tall tale of CERN’s history and impressions of the project. My Imperial colleagues Roberto Trotta, Amanda Chatten and Dave Clements are also participating (and Dave is blogging, too).

The second night, after our visit to CERN and a dinner of fondue and swiss music (possibly not the high point of the trip), all of the 24 participants (eight groups each of an architect, artist and a scientist) gave a few-minute presentation on their work and interests. I was, to use the cliché, blown away by the ambition and accomplishment of everyone else involved. In particular, I am lucky enough to be working with Budapest-based artist Attila Csorgo and architect Shin Egashira, who works out of the Architecture Association, the overall initiators and sponsors of the project. Both build amazing machines. Attila’s constructions seem to me to be about the interaction of the machine and the environment, or of the components of the machine itself, whereas Shin’s involve more effort on the part of the viewer/participant (but I am sure I will get to understand their work and their practice better as I spend more time with it and them).

We spent the next day in a lovely old Swiss building, brainstorming our projects — we’re meant to come up with a “prototype” to have in place for this summer’s Architecture Biennale in Venice. Our brief was to explore the concept of “Mechanical Energy”, and we found an area of convergence in the idea of cameras, in the process of taking pictures, areas that both Shin and Attila have explored in their work.

Right now, our first idea is to combine the Planck Surveyor’s method of scanning the sky with a microphone-based sensor and camera, to make sound and light pictures of the volume surrounding the apparatus. We’re looking forward to a weekend retreat into the wilds of Dorset, to Hooke Park, a site run by the AA.

Thanks, finally, to Stefano Rabolli Pansera, the brilliant, optimistic, and enthusiastic mind behind this project, as well as all of the other people from the Architecture Association doing the hard work.

I’m in Geneva for a few days as part of a project called “Beyond Entropy: When Entropy Becomes Form”, sponsored by the Architectural Association back in London, the brainchild of Stefano Rabolli Pansera and others at the AA. It brings together eight trios of architects, artists and scientists to produce works to be shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale later this year, and possibly the better-known Art Biennale in 2011. But beyond that broad outline, none of us know much about what we will be producing; that is the purpose of this very first gathering. I admit I am not quite sure why we are here in Geneva, visiting CERN, other than the fact that it is a cool place to talk about art, science and architecture (which is good enough for me).

Imperial is happily over-represented in the scientist column, with about half of the scientists, but otherwise, it’s a broadly-spread bunch, from all over the UK and Western Europe. One of the other scientists is my mate and fellow cosmologist-blogger Peter Coles, who has already beaten me to the blogging punch.

I went to see the new show at London’s Gagosian Gallery, Crash: An Homage to JG Ballard.

It assembles work from mostly well-known artists with some connection to the recently-deceased Ballard or his themes.

So there are the obligatory car crashes from Warhol, referencing the eponynmous Crash, probably Ballard’s best-known novel. Indeed, works about cars and airplanes, sex and violence make up the bulk of the show. Tacita Dean’s Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard) seems to be a scene from one of Ballard’s dystopian end-of-the-world sagas. Ed Ruscha’s posterish “Fountain of Crystal” gestures toward both Crash (where the featured quote is taken from) and the early novel The Crystal World. Roger Hiorns’ combines the two with his Untitled engines, encased in bright blue crystalline copper sulfate.

But my favorite works take up one of my own obsessions, Roger Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (with which Ballard had a documented passion). Florian Maier-Aichen’s “One Day at the Spiral Jetty” shows an eerie, inexplicably lit, nighttime scene of the work on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

Another favorite, a part of Mike Nelson’s Triple Bluff Canyon, is also an obscure reference, since the original version of Nelson’s piece featured a reproduction of Smithson’s early-70s Kent State installation, Partially Buried Woodshed.

Warhol, Liechtenstein, Francis Bacon — as good as these artists and their works are, they’ve been drafted, but it is remarkable how many of the other artists are consciously engaging with Ballard. Which may be a statement about how scarily universal Ballard’s themes of violence, ennui and apocalypse have become.

(There is more information on the show, and Ballard more generally, by Iain Sinclair in the Guardian and in the Independent’s photo feature.)

One of my holiday treks this year was across town to visit Bunhill Fields, final resting place of two of my favorite Londoners: William Blake and Thomas Bayes.

Blake is of course one of the most famous poets in the English language, but most people know him only from short poems like The Tiger [sic] (“Tyger, Tyger burning bright/ In the forests of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry”) and Jerusalem, sung in Anglican churches each week. But most of Blake’s work is much too weird to make it into church. It is peopled by gods and monsters, illuminated by Blake’s own wonderful over-the-top illustrations. (For example, America: A Prophecy, his poetic interpretation of the American Revolutionary War, begins “The shadowy Daughter of Urthona stood before red Orc/When fourteen suns had faintly journey’d o’er his dark abode” — George Washington and Thomas Jefferson don’t make Blake’s version.)

Blake’s gravestone sits right on the pavement in the middle of Bunhill Fields, and as such unfortunately has been slightly damaged.

I don’t read Blake every day or even every week, but I probably do use Bayes’s famous theorem at least that often. As I and other bloggers have gone on and on about, Bayes’s theorem is the mathematical statement of how we ought to rigorously and consistently incorporate new information into our model of the world. Bayes himself wrote down only a version appropriate for a restricted version of this problem, and used words, rather than mathematica symbols. Nowadays, we usually write it mathematically, and in a completely general form, as

Which means, very roughly, that the so-called posterior probability, P(H|D) — the probability of some hypothesis, H, given data, D — is equal to P(H) — the prior probability of the hypothesis, H — times the likelihood, P(D|H) — the probability of observing the actual data that we obtained given that hypothesis; finally, all of this needs to be normalized by the quantity P(D). This seems pretty obscure, but it really is a model for learning: the prior represents our knowledge in the absence of the new data, and the theorem tells us how to update this in the face of new data. And it really is a theorem: a statement of mathematical fact. So this statement really is the foundation for the use of probability in reasoning about the world, which is the science of statistics (despite the internecine wars within the statistics community about exactly how one ought to make sense of the concept of “probability” itself), or more broadly, science itself. So Bayes is a man whose life is well worth celebrating by all of us interested in and affected by science.

Bayes is buried in his family tomb, now bearing the moss-covered Inscription: “Rev. Thomas Bayes, son of the said Joshua and Ann Bayes, 7 April 1761. In recognition of Thomas Bayes’s important work in probability this vault was restored in 1960 with contributions received from statisticians throughout the world.” (With restoration and upkeep since by Bayesian Efficient Strategic Trading of Hoboken, NJ, USA —across the Hudson River from New York City— and ISBA, the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.)

When I’m traveling I try to read the New Yorker — a transatlantic flight usually gets me through most of an issue. I was even more interested than usual when I picked up the issue at Heathrow and found the front-cover blurb, “Physics vs Poetry: New fiction by Ian McEwan”. McEwan is thought of as a “science-friendly” writer and has often populated his fiction with scientists and scientific ideas (usually doctors and medicine, as in Enduring Love and Saturday). His new story is called “The Use of Poetry”, but doesn’t quite manage to escape stereotyping his protagonist, the made-up physics Nobelist Michael Beard. McEwan’s Beard doesn’t really get poetry for its own sake; for him, “The Use of Poetry” is mostly for seducing his wife-to-be. At least McEwan is smart enough, and a good enough writer, that his stereotype isn’t quite so simple: his Beard is so smart that he can fake his way into smart opinions about Milton. He doesn’t really get it, it seems, but he can mouth the words at least as well as the supposed literary scholars (who, needless to say, neither try nor succeed at understanding his physics).

And — I’m not sure if this is to McEwan’s credit or otherwise — he stereotypes Beard’s counterpart, his future wife Maisie Farmer, studying English at Oxford when Beard is doing Physics, even more. After University, she becomes a hackneyed post-sixties feminist figure, attending “a group run by a collective Californian women…. Her consciousness was raised.”

McEwan, I think, prefers rationalists to literary types, but draws the divide too sharply. As Peter Coles has been talking about lately, that stereotypical distinction is just wrong. Most of my physicist friends love art, novels, poetry, music — and quite a few of them make it themselves, usually quite proudly if with varying degrees of emotional and aesthetic success.

What makes McEwan’s portrayal of Beard so unappealing is the backhandedness of the compliment behind it: yes, he’s smarter than everyone around him. But somehow even he doesn’t quite get the poetry, even if that’s almost a distinction that doesn’t make much of a difference.

I’ll be appearing this Thursday, September 3, at the newly-reopened Whitechapel Gallery’s Study Studio as part of “Knot Night”, hosted by sculptor Richard Wentworth. Richard has produced a box (or vitrine, if you want to be all art-world about it) called “A Confiscation of String” for the Gallery, and so a few of us have been dragged in to talk about string, knots, and pretty much anything else that we can free-associate to from there. In addition to Richard and me, we’ll have Kings College Material Engineer Mark Miodownik, and Priyesh Mistry, founder of something called “The Knit Crowd” at the Ruskin School of Art.

I don’t know much about what the others will be talking about. But even worse, I don’t know much about what I’ll be talking about. The obvious physics connections are cosmic strings and string theory — any other ideas? (You can also participate in other ways: “To add string to the collection email confiscationofstring@whitechapelgallery.org”.)

The event is officially sold out, but if you show up at the Whitechapel on Thursday evening after 6, you might just find some tickets available.

I spent a few hours last week with a bunch of science fiction writers, giving them a tutorial on modern cosmology as part of the (first) “Physics for Fiction” workshop organized by my Imperial Astrophysics Colleague Dave Clements. The participants were some very big names in modern Science Fiction, and some hot up-and-coming writers, including Stephen Baxter, Pat Cadogan, Jaine Fenn, Paul McAuley, Hannu Rajaniemi and Alastair Reynolds. There are some photos, including a couple of me in full-on lecturing mode, by photos by Simon Bradshaw on Flickr.

Science fiction writers are a tough crowd: many of them are technically literate (there were a few science PhDs among them) but it’s also clear that, for their writing at least, they don’t just want to know the facts, they want to know what’s cool, and what can be relevant on a human scale, and how they can pass that along to their readers. If it can be vaguely realistic, all the better. So there was perhaps more interest in planets and quantum cryptography than in the origin of the Universe (although that’s a subject that some of our participants who dabble in the grandest “space opera” could sometimes touch on.

It took me a few months, but I finally finished (the late) David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I enjoyed the writing, and found the stories of the main characters — Gately and Hal — affecting and moving, studies of sinking into and struggling out of various addictions. This was a writer, it seemed, who saw his craft as a way into the unavoidably cliché-ridden human condition. Comedy and tragedy combined as in that “poor Yorick, … a fellow of infinite jest” appropriately lifted from Shakespeare, refracted throughout the novel.

And but so I admit being put off by the high-concept comedy science-fiction bits of the storyline. Obsessive-compulsive crooner President? Subsidized years to add to government revenue? The infamous giant babies and feral hamsters stalking the (former) northeast USA? All cheap shots, really, and not that funny. (I’ve got nothing against science fiction; just a couple down on my bedside pile of books is Ian M Banks’ newest Matter.)

Although the big satellites get most of the press, a lot of astronomy is done from balloons, huge mylar bubbles that can carry a gondola up to about 120,000 feet over the earth — more than 22 miles or 32 km. That’s high enough that much of the atmospheric contamination is gone, but a lot cheaper and easier to reach than orbit. I’ve been involved in the BOOMERaNG and MAXIMA balloon experiments, to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background, and currently with EBEX. Some experiments, BOOMERaNG among them, take advantage of the conditions at the South Pole and launches from Antarctica, using the “polar vortex” in the atmosphere to keep the balloon aloft for as much as a couple of weeks. (I should point out that for me, “involved with” means that I stay home where it’s warm and comfortable, but get to play with the data once my hardier colleagues return from the field.)

If you want to get a feel for ballooning, check out BLAST!, a film made of the campaign to fly the eponymous experiment (the acronym stands for Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope), made by Paul Devlin, the film-maker brother of one the experiment’s Principal Investigator. It follows the team from their university labs to the Northern launch site in Scandanavia, and finally to Antarctica. I haven’t seen the whole thing yet, but I’m told it does a good job of giving the impression of the alternating excitement and boredom — and lofty goals — of these experiments.

If you’re in the UK, you can see it this week on BBC 4’s Storyville, this Wednesday, 7 January 2009, at 10:00pm; other screenings are listed here.

I went to the excellent Cold War Modern exhibit at the V&A museum, a very specific take on what’s usually called in Britain the “postwar” period, concentrating on design and art from 1945 to 1970. Muscle-flexing propaganda from Moscow (and to a lesser extent from Washington), nuclear nightmares, the space race, the successful revolutions against the west in Cuba and Southeast Asia, the less successful ones against both sides of ‘68. Although there was plenty of work from America (Lever House, Dr Strangelove, Eames chairs), to me the more interesting were the Moscow apartment houses, the Czech glassworks, Le Corbusier’s avant-garde film made with Varèse and Xenakis.

But because of the remit of the show, literature and music — especially rock’n’roll — were largely missing. So I’ll use this opportunity to post these reminders to a couple of my favorite and still relevant cold war artifacts.

First, from William Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever….

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

On the other hand, less overtly life-affirming, we have the Sex Pistols’ Holidays in the Sun, Johnny Rotten trying to take a visit to East Germany in 1977.

Well they’re staring all night and
They’re staring all day
I had no reason to be here at all
But now I gotta reason it’s no real reason
And I’m waiting at the Berlin Wall

Gotta go over the Berlin Wall
I don’t understand it….
I gotta go over the wall
I don’t understand this bit at all….

Claustrophobia there’s too much paranoia
There’s too many closets so when will we fall
…

Gotta go over the Berlin Wall
I don’t understand it….
I gotta go over the wall
I don’t understand this bit at all…

Please don’t be waiting for me

But this doesn’t capture Rotten’s manic, fearful delivery, standing among and watching the end of man. Is it safe on either side of the wall? Who is it that might be waiting for him? When will I be blown up?