Move Speak Spin!

Ack, it's been more than a week since I've posted.  I will blame this on the fact that I lost my science notebook.  Yes, folks, you can cry a little - my notebook has been lost to the annals of the New York City streets.  It had all my notes in it about the World Science Festival, so I cried a little too.  And then procrastinated writing about the other lectures I saw, because I wanted my notes!

While I get over that, I will regale you with a few really cool exhibits from the Science Fair on the 14th.  One was Move Speak Spin, and you can see a little clip of their work on YouTube - Move Speak Spin.  They're a dance group that uses math to tell stories and make art.  This clip is a tiny section in which they danced with triangles.  Their World Science Festival blurb reads, "From tap dance to the permutations of a single sheet of paper, from flying machines to the ancient Chinese puzzle tangrams, this dance company displays the magic and mystery that is both dance and mathematics."

It's really fun!

The World Science Festival! - Nothing: The Subtle Science of Emptiness

The 2nd annual World Science Festival was this weekend, and quite frankly, it was amazing.  On Thursday, I got to sit in on the lecture about Nothing: The Subtle Science of Emptiness.

And what does the moderator lead with?  John Cage's 4:33 of Silence.  It was brilliant and freaked a few people out.  What I didn't know - and thought was really cool - was that 4 minutes and 33 seconds is actually 273 seconds.  At -273 degrees Celsius, all molecular motion stops.  Ahh John Cage.  Crazy, but rather brilliant.

The moderator, John Hockenberry, then led with "Much Ado About Nothing", which made my little heart pitter-patter.  He started discussing the concept of "creation out of nothing" and how this underlying concept is extremely hard to grasp.  The concept of zero took much longer to dream up than the concept of 1.  One can be seen.  Zero takes imagination.

The lecture took a swift turn into science-mode, and I'll be honest, I couldn't follow all of it.  And I definitely couldn't write it all down.  But the participants did speak about two concepts that really hit me.  

John Hockenberry brought up the question of why there is something in the universe rather than nothing.  Why would something even be created?  And one of the panelists (I wish I could remember who) simply said, "Well, there are infinite ways to have something.  There is only one way to have nothing."  I love it when statistics can put everything into perspective.

The second striking point piggy-backed off this idea.  Frank Wilczek (hah!  I remember him!) explained that nothingness is inherently unstable.  Although I will butcher his explanation right now, just take a second to think about it.  The only place actual nothingness exists in our world is in a vacuum.  And how quickly does that vacuum disappear once the seal has been destroyed or something shifts?  Once entropy takes over?  We're talking milliseconds here.

But onto his fascinating explanation.  He said that nothingness is unstable, and while that sounds contradictory to the idea of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, it's not.   (Wikipedia's definition states that "the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium."  Meaning, things fall apart.)  So, while it sounds like we should all be moving toward a state of nothingness, in fact we're moving in the opposite direction.  

Yes, it takes energy to create something.  But you get more energy from the attraction of those things, than you do from nothingness.  Quarks and anti-quarks.  Matter and anti-matter.  The building blocks of our universe.  The energy of these attractions are what has created us and why we're still here to discuss it.  

As Prof. Wilczek was describing this (in much better detail), he kept bringing his hands together to illustrate his point and unconsciously drawing a slightly lopsided, heart-shaped circle.  And I was struck by how much this definition of science sounded like love.   

Interesting.

Happy Birthday, Tetris!

I completely missed this on Saturday, unfortunately.  But Tetris had a birthday!  (I'm going to consider this art, because it's pretty to look at and can easily keep me distracted for two hours.  And who hasn't made up stories about evil kingdoms and walls that must come down?)

So, yes, Tetris was born on June 6th, 1984, which makes it 25.  Who knew I shared a birth year with Tetris?  

Fun fact #2: Andrew Lloyd Webber did a dance remix of the song under the name Doctor Spin.  And it made it to #6 on the UK charts.

Fun fact #3: Tetris has a repetitive stress syndrome named after it.  This was taken from wikipedia - "The game can also cause a repetitive stress symptom in that the brain will involuntarily picture tetris combinations even when the player is not playing the game (the Tetris effect)."

Yes, children, Tetris may damage your brain.  Now get out there and throw balls at your sister's head.

Happy Birthday, Tetris!

The Invisibility of Math and Science

I've been rolling this idea around in my head for awhile, and thought this would be a perfect place to air it out.  

The real purpose of this blog is to find connections between science and the arts.  Meaningful connections.  The kind that open up possibilities on both sides of the aisle.  To me, one can only enhance the other, but this is a relatively new concept for me.  I knew I was going to be an actress when I was in the sixth grade.  I didn't even make it through AP Biology because it was interfering with all the shows I was doing.  And for most of my life, I thought that was completely fine.  What one earth would I need biology for?

Now, of course, I think the complete opposite, but I know where these ideologies come from.  Biology (and most of higher level science and math) doesn't seem necessary to a lay person's way of life.  And that's because science and math are invisible.  They're designed to be.

How many of you have an iPhone?  How many of you have a cell phone?  That slim, wireless, no-antenna'd piece of technology stems directly from new breakthroughs in math and science, one of them being fractals.  I bet you had no idea about that.

But I would also bet that you've seen this somewhere:

This is a visualization of fractals, a piece of art derived from math, if you will.  There was a craze a few years back and these images were everywhere.  It was math made visible.  Yet I have no idea how these images can make my cell phone get smaller every time I upgrade.  A perfect opportunity lost.  

Art, by its very nature, is visible.  The reason for art is to gather a community, to share a concept, to explain and to explore together.  This could very easily be the case for science too, but we've pushed it aside and allowed others to explore without us.  It's become invisible.  I don't want to know how a series of 0s and 1s can become the internet.  The internet has been handed to me and I don't have to do the thinking, so why should I?

Ah, yes, well.  Here's why.  In a fortuitous happenstance, while I was searching the Internet for definitions on fractals, I found this.  Benoit Mandelbrot, the man who coined the term fractal (and has the cutest old-man face I have ever seen), also wrote a book called The (Mis)behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Trouble.  He claims that our fundamental financial assumptions are flawed (we are a rhythmic species, so therefore the market should be rhythmic), and backs it up with fractal analysis. (I'll point you toward a wikipedia page on the Elliot Wave Principle to explain this further.)

This isn't exactly art, true, but it does prove my point.  We don't understand the concepts behind our technologies and our complex world, because science and math have succeeded in making themselves autonomous.  Invisible.  But what if we understood the fundamentals?  If we once again gathered a community and discussed the technologies we're using, explored them and explained them?  We might be able to save ourselves some serious global heartache.