Drawing and quantum theory: part one

Cézanne: Pot and soup tureen

The more we find out the less we know, a cliché but a powerful one. One of the main reasons I draw is because I’m trying to get a grip on how the world is, on how it all fits together and how drawing and humans and the differences between things exist. It’s very difficult and some things sort of begin to make sense but they don’t always support each other. Words are tricky things. They give an impression that the world consists of things that can be easily identified. Such as apples, tables and elephants, but that seems to me to be the problem. These things aren’t really separate from anything. An apple is actually a certain moment in a series of events we call a tree, a moment that can become part of a series of actions that make it part of something called at times a human. As it is eaten and digested it becomes part of a symbiotic system that is mainly bacteria, but part of the system is also composed of human DNA, the clumped togetherness of its cells being what is called a human being. Part of the idea of being human is to have a language and as a thing it is used by the non-bacterial element to in some way separate itself out of the entanglement of its own existence. This is an impossibility; but one that helps this tiny part of the entanglement in the use of an operating system that has worked for it for quite some time. Everything is interconnected but in order to think about it human beings use language, a system that operates by making it seem as if the universe consists of separate things. That’s a tricky thing to think about using words, which is a good reason to draw. If you look at the 'pot and soup tureen' drawing by Cézanne above, you know the words for things are drifting away and being replaced by a series of interacting relationships, ones that are experienced in the making of the image, relationships not defined by words.

I have been worried about the art / science divide for many years, and those of you that are regular followers of this blog will have realised that every now and again I attempt to look at what is going on from a chemistry or physics base, by asking questions such as why does ink stick to paper or what type of carbon is charcoal? However these occasional diversions don’t really get anywhere near the big issue, which is, how can the findings of contemporary science be reconciled with a philosophy as to how I approach my existence as an artist? 

Therefore I have decided to begin with some basic information as to how science describes what the universe is, or at least my own grasp of this from the standpoint of an artist trying to read what the scientists are saying.  I will though have to start with a caveat. As I have already pointed out words are tricky things and they suggest that there are boundaries between things but as I have already pointed out as an artist who draws, it is quite easy to spot the limitations that verbal and written languages have. As I draw it all becomes about relationships, and my drawings are at their worst when I begin to draw things defined by words, such as mouths or fingers when trying to draw a human being in space. However when I begin to read up about science I’m back with these words and their problems again. For instance science can make it seem like there are basic building blocks to the world. Take for example quarks. There are at the moment six different types, up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm. In giving these things names it makes you think as if they must be discrete things but as I have already suggested the problem with words is that they cover up reality and give a false impression of where the edges of things are. So what if the ‘up’ quark is actually a certain moment in a series of events we call a proton, a moment that can become part of a series of actions that make it part of something called at times an atom, and so on. I’m very aware that mathematics needs to be able to break things down into numbers in order to work, but I have some basic suspicions about maths and wonder if as a language it too tends to shape the way we think, just as verbal languages do.

While we are here let’s carry on thinking about quarks. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ quarks come entangled as protons, (one down and two ups) and neutrons, (two down and one up), which made me first of all think that ‘up’ quarks were positive and ‘down’ quarks neutral. However these combinations are about ‘fractional’ charges. The ‘down’ is minus one third, the ‘up’ plus two thirds.  But these are electrical charges, which are supposed to be properties of physical matter that cause it to experience a force when placed in an electromagnetic field. And here we have another problem. Because if the properties of matter are forces that experience change when coming into contact with an electrical field, these properties are themselves of a similar nature, therefore matter is in fact energy. There is no physical matter, just energy waves. But what we can do is measure these waves and see their effects. Again we have a problem with words. Because the words tend to get us to think of things, the loss of the idea of the word ‘matter’ and its replacement with another word, ‘energy’ seems a big shift. But if there was no such thing as ‘matter’ in the first place, it shouldn’t worry us too much if it is now called ‘energy’. My experience of all this is one of size relativity. My perceptual organs are of the wrong scale and operate in the wrong timeframe to see the field resistance of a wave pattern as my fingers touch these plastic keys. I use another word, ‘touch’ to indicate a certain feeling and my fingers don’t appear to merge with the plastic key on contact. At least they don’t in the timeframe that my sense organs work within. However to another word defined object, such as the sandstone rocks on which the foundations of the building stand, it may be that molecule merging is quite feasible and as my body over time disintegrates and its atoms merge with others there may be a moment when by chance one of the atoms that at one time constituted a set of vibrations within my finger is combined with an atom that was once part of a black plastic letter R within a computer’s QUERTY keyboard. 

In order to make my way in the world and type this text I have to believe in or accept a certain type of reality, one that I cant really touch or grasp in its entirety because I just cant experience all the various parts of it. This doesn’t mean all the various parts are not real, just that the edges of things are not fixed by words, that things slip into each other and that there are various timeframes within which the things operate. As a human being, I of course tend to always use a human timeframe in order to test out my operating system, but a mayfly will have its own take on things and so will a galaxy. All I’m saying is that my experience has to by its very nature, be limited, and that is a useful reminder of my hubristic tendency to think that humans are more important than other things. 

If we go back to quarks, there are even more word and mathematically bound conundrums. For instance, the quarks ‘up’ and ‘down’ are very light. The ‘up’ is 0.2% of the mass of the proton and the ‘down’ 0.5% of the proton mass. It doesn’t add up, unless you drop the ‘mass’ idea and think about the energy that is used to hold these things together, the strong nuclear force.  This strong interaction is apparently mediated by the exchange of massless particles called gluons that act not only between quarks but also between antiquarks and other gluons. So we have two types of energy here; the strong force that binds everything together using massless particles and an electro-magnetic energy or electrical charge that can at times be measured as mass. (E=MC²) This reminds me of ‘OM’ one of the most important spiritual sounds, for a Brahman the sound of ‘OM’ represents the ultimate reality, the entirety of the universe, it encompasses all other cosmic principles, and therefore all knowledge. The vibration that can be set up by making the ‘OM’ sound can be very powerful and it can be visualised. See: To be lost in the making of and listening to the sound ‘OM’, being for myself a type of entanglement or immersion into all things that words don't describe. 

In some ways all words are similar to ‘OM’ in that they can be sounded as things in themselves and when they are they are beautiful and they begin to float away from their fixed associations. We very rarely make up words that sound like other things, when we do we call it onomatopoeia, words such as ‘quack’ or a much more modern invention, ‘zip’ based on the sound it makes as you use it. Which is probably the ‘correct’ term for zip as a made up word, because in Greek the compound word onomatopoeia means the "making or creating of names". We forget that names are crafted things, often crafted by individuals and then refined by others. This ‘computer’ that I am typing on has a name that was first seen to be used in a 1613 book called 'The Yong Mans Gleanings' by the English writer Richard Braithwait: "I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number." A computer in the seventeenth century being a person who carried out calculations, rather than an inanimate object. An interesting shift that demonstrates that the line between humans and other things is perhaps not as sharp as one thinks. 

These shifts in what things are, a word being both a sound and a sign for something, or a sign that has changed its referent, all point to a instability or constant shifting of the ground on which word bound meaning is built. Words are shaped breath, and like our ancestors spitting out charcoal spray over their hands, they attempt to hold on to things, to give them an illusion of preservation. The thing called Garry Barker is very unlike the thing called Garry Barker 60 years ago, and for my dentist is a very different experience compared to that of my close relatives. The words Garry Barker mean nothing to my commingling with that apple and the bacteria in my gut, they just make it harder to see certain moments in a series of events we call Garry Barker, moments that can become part of a series of actions that make it part of something called at times reality. 

Going back to the building blocks of physics again, the mass of the proton is in fact due to the energy that holds the quarks together, not the quarks themselves. I know if as human beings we set about releasing the energy tied up in mass we release an atomic force that can eliminate most complex living creatures, so whichever state something is in is vital and my fear of us humans doing such a thing as releasing the energy from the mass is real. Something that benignly exists in one type of ‘reality’ being perhaps in another a more monstrous thing, is this really what we mean by the uncanny? The quarks, ‘strange’ and ‘charm’ are rare. They're also massive in comparison to ‘up’ and ‘down’ quarks and as soon as they come into being they quickly decay, leaving nothing behind.  This suggests to me that they are really part of something else and that the words ‘strange’ and ‘charm’ prevent us seeing their entanglement in other things. For instance the Higgs field, something like an electromagnetic field permeates all of space-time, and it helps stick things together.  (It is interesting to compare the ether with the Higgs field, because as an idea it also filled all space and was thought necessary to support the propagation of electromagnetic waves) Everything has to ‘swim’ through this field, so electrons quarks and neutrinos if they have to move must move in conjunction with the Higgs field. The very fact that these fundamental particles have to exist within the Higgs field is the very reason they have mass. As particles such as electrons or quarks move through the Higgs field some move through lightly and hardly touch it and others get tightly entangled in the field. The more entangled the heavier the particle, the ‘top’ quark for instance being very heavy indeed. At this point we must remember that at this level everything is something else, such as when an electromagnetic field is excited, it produces a photon, which is not really a separate thing more an excitation of the field, and when the Higgs field is excited it is a Higgs particle that mediates the interactions. In this mediation the Higgs particle gives all the other elementary particles their mass. I do though suspect that we have two levels of translation here, the first one being a mathematical one that likes to fasten on to points and possibilities and a verbal one that likes to have words that refer to identifiable things. The swirl of energy forms that lie beneath what we see as the solid world, being I suspect something far beyond our ability to create metaphor. Lets look at that Higgs field metaphor again. Imagine a bar magnet. It has an electro-magnetic field that is negative at one end of the magnet and positive at the other end. Electrons, with a charge of -1, move through the field toward the positive end of the magnet, and collect together with positively charged protons. Let’s excite the field by sending in a sudden influx of electrons, this means that the electromagnetic field becomes ‘flared up’ in a certain spot and that flare-up is a photon emission. Photons are particles that have no mass, they appear to work as mediators ‘helping’ other particles interact with the field by momentarily popping in and out of existence. It’s as if they help nudge the other particles into the right relationship with the electromagnetic field, and it is suspected that the Higgs particle does a similar job for the Higgs field, entangling particles up either loosely or tightly depending on how well aligned they are on entry. This mediation effect seems to exist everywhere, such as in our stomachs, whereby tiny bacteria do all the work mediating between food particles and our digestion system. This is why things have fuzzy edges, they are never one thing, always part of something else, they are always on a journey and as the journey unfolds there are strange attractors that work to make the luggage they carry either heavier or lighter. Is this then what drawing is for myself, a mediator that helps me to have better relationships with other things? If the Higgs field can be thought of as being able to give particles mass, a drawing can also be seen as a field that gives mass or gravity to things that can often feel as if they have no traction or weight. Ideas are things that can too easily float away, they need a touch of mass if they are to be seen as a possibility and drawing can do that, it gives substance to what has none. 

Avis Newman

When looking at drawings, thinking about what is happening on a sub atomic scale can be used to develop ways of appreciating our experience. This drawing by Avis Newman is large and its scale asks us to 'in our minds eye' physically engage with it. I would suggest that the gallery has been lit to suggest that the experience is not unlike seeing the surface of a cave painting. 

Marks and stains move around as if forms are coming into being, they suggest rather than describe and as your gaze moves across the surface, these drawings unfold in time. For Newman they arrive out of her subconscious, but for the viewer they are surfaces of perceptual engagement, ones that can allow us to think of drawing as an analogy for an exchange between matter and energy. Newman's body would have had to be active and stretched to fill these images with marks, the traces of her body movement being now embedded in these drawings' surfaces. She is present and at the same time absorbed into the things she has made, each mark a certain moment in a series of events we call a drawing, a moment that can become part of a series of actions that make it part of something called at times human experience. 

Drawing and quantum theory Part two

Emma McNally drawings

Free download on Quantum Mechanics

Arika Some of the overlapping ideas developed by Arika are published here.