Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

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.

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.