The Pioneer Plaque

The Pioneer Plaque

An understanding of scientific concepts has allowed us as a species to begin to think beyond our world and to imagine what it might be like to meet an extra-terrestrial being. When we as a species decide that we want to communicate with Aliens, what do we do? We send them a drawing, and in this case it is a drawing of which we know quite a lot about the decisions made as to why the images on it are what they are. 

Pioneer 10

In 1972, an attempt to contact extra-terrestrial life began with the launch of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, a vehicle designed to attain enough velocity to escape the solar system and therefore the possibility of reaching an extra-terrestrial civilisation. The idea of including a specially crafted message that was designed to be read by any extra-terrestrials it might bump into, was a late addition and was overseen by Dr. Carl Sagan, Professor Frank Drake  and artist Linda Salzman.

The problem these three had to solve was whether they could come up with any universally understood concepts that could be communicable to intelligent extra-terrestrial life. The first principle that was decided upon when this question was being debated was that the only similarity between Earth bound humans and any extra-terrestrial civilisation would be that we belong to the same universe. Because it is science and mathematics that we use to understand that universe, it was further reasoned that this would be the same for any other species. Hence the Pioneer Plaque was initiated, which would operate as a symbolic message to any extra-terrestrials the Pioneer 10 might encounter. This plaque was designed to be attached to the exterior of Pioneer 10 and had its visual language developed by directly linking the drawing on the plaque to clear, fundamental scientific concepts.
The first issue decided upon was to set out a standard for the measurement of distance and time, a standard that could then be used throughout the plaque to ensure consistency. In order to do this it was decided that hydrogen, the most abundant element in the cosmos, would be the element around which a communication system would be evolved. Therefore it was decided to draw a symbolic representation of two hydrogen atoms at the top left of the plaque, each in a different energy state.

Image of hydrogen atoms as inscribed on the Pioneer plaque

The text immediately below is how the image is described in a scientific journal, the hyper-links were also in the description, so I have left them in because they give an idea of how complex this idea is. 

'The image above is of a schematic representation of the hyperfine transition of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. The spin-flip transition of a hydrogen atom’s electron has a frequency of about 1420.405 MHz, which corresponds to a period of 0.704 ns. Light at this frequency has a vacuum wavelength of 21.106 cm (which is also the distance the light travels in that time period). Below the symbol, the small vertical line—representing the binary digit 1—specifies a unit of length (21 cm) as well as a unit of time (0.7 ns). Both units are also used as measurements in the other symbols'.

I presume the scientists behind this thinking thought that the creatures that would meet Pioneer would also be scientists. Not just that but that as scientists they would also think like earth scientists. 

Fundamental concepts such as the hydrogen atom can however be described in several ways and the concept of a schematic representation is itself a very complex one, one that would have first of all been introduced to people like Sagan in school science classrooms. Below are a few other representations of Hydrogen and its electron. There are several problems with the decision to use the symbol chosen. For instance ionised hydrogen, i.e. a hydrogen atom stripped of its electron and existing as a free proton, is pretty common in the interstellar medium, and solar wind. So the format of one proton surrounded by one electron doesn't always describe the state of hydrogen. It has also been established that the electron  moves in a wave pattern around an elliptical orbit. This orbit is often referred to as a cloud, because the electron operates in three dimensional space and moves so fast it is in effect occupying a cloud of possible positions. The idea of a static symbol like a dot or spot, would be hard for anyone outside of a small sub-group to understand. 

Words can be put together in different ways to say the same thing. For instance we can rewrite the paragraph above like this: 

'When atoms of hydrogen change from one energy state to another—a process called the hyperfine transition—electromagnetic radiation is released. It is this wave that harbours the standard of measure used throughout the illustrations on the plaque. The wavelength (approximately 21 centimeters) serves as a spatial measurement, and the period (approximately .7 nanoseconds) serves as a measurement of time. The final detail of this schematic is a small tick between the atoms of hydrogen, assigning these values of distance and time to the binary number 1'.

As you can see from both the written and drawn illustrations above, there are several ways to visualise or verbalise the idea of a hydrogen atom, in particular how do you visualise an idea that is in many places at once and is always in movement? Does a fast moving electron appear to be more like a pixelated cloud, or does it look more like a series of linked wave forms, or would an external observer be more likely to be aware of the presence of antimatter and would expect this to be represented too?

Bees draw by flying dancing patterns through the air, what would a life form that had a similar evolutionary history to that of a bee make of this plaque? 

The most prominent figures on the plaque are those of two adult humans: a man and woman. The man bends his arm and displays an open palm. At the time it was believed that this was an internationally agreed greeting on the Earth, but it would be meaningless to an extraterrestrial civilisation and even on some parts of the Earth a naked man with his arm raised could be seen as a threat. The drawing could just as well have been done upside down and from the back for all the sense someone who wasn't trained in the conventions of reading a drawing would make of it. When photographs were first shown to Amazonian Indians they apparently couldn't recognise what they were, so even it would appear indexical systems such as photography are culturally learnt. We are so immersed in a photographically centred culture that we have forgotten, or never noticed that we had to learn what photographs represented. The woman hangs her arms by her sides and stands with her weight shifted rearward apparently to dispel any misunderstandings regarding a fixed body and limb position; it was drawn this way to show that we are mobile and flexible. There was little thought going into the relative positions between the representation of the man and the woman. The man is active, raising his arm in salute, the woman passive, her body less confrontational. Another totally accepted cultural norm of the 1970s is in place. As well of course of the stylised haircuts that might as well be hats or strange growths and the fact that both figures have no facial or body hair, factors that speak so much about cultural norms of the time. The man's haircut and woman's hair style single them out as young mature white western caucasians, their hair, facial features and body types set out according to a particular norm or measure, (no one is too old, disabled, fat or too thin) that other people, races and cultures were at the time measured against. 
Beside the illustrations of the humans is the binary number 8, inscribed between two ticks, indicating the height the woman. The extra-terrestrial being is supposed to conclude that the woman is 8 units tall, the unit being the wavelength (21 centimeters) described by the hyperfine transition key; thus, the woman is 8 times 21 centimeters, or about 5.5 feet tall.
At the heart of the plaque is an exploding star shape of lines and dashes. In the centre of this star format is meant to be our home star, the sun; the radial spokes signify the relative distances and directions to pulsars, (rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit electromagnetic radiation at regular intervals). Accompanying each line is the period of the respective pulsar, once again, in binary. Not only does this map communicate position, but time as well. The rate of electromagnetic bursts from pulsars changes over time; thus, the period of the pulsars denoted on the plaque serves as a timestamp. It was presumed that a civilisation that has developed radio astronomy would have the capability to comprehend the nature of pulsars. Which they may well have, but far more complex a problem for them to solve would be the interpretation of this plaque. As a further confirmation of where the Earth is, our solar system’s planets are depicted along the bottom edge of the plaque with their respective distances to the sun in binary. A line with an arrowhead leaves from the third circle from the large circle on the left and a small drawing of what looks like a falling sailing boat is next to it. This represents Pioneer 10 leaving the Earth, the third planet from the sun. The problem being that the relative sizes of the spacecraft, sun and planets and distances between them can't be represented in such a small drawing. The Earth is about the size of one of the Sun's average sunspots, and if you were to link sizes to relative distances between planets you would have to have a drawing with long extensions that would make the spacecraft unworkable. The drawing of the sailing boat on its side reappears in the background behind the drawing of the man and woman. It is meant to show relative sizes and explain that the size of Pioneer 10 could be used to help visualise the size of grown humans. However the convention of overlapping forms in a drawing to represent one thing being in front of another is a very sophisticated one, one not learnt by humans until quite a late stage in their educational development. The idea that you can leave gaps in a form to suggest it sits behind other forms is usually only learnt if you go to schools that teach drawing from a Western European perspective. The fact that the Pioneer spacecraft is visualised from one specific point of view is also something only understandable if you follow engineering drawing conventions of plans and elevations. So lets hope the drawing is first seen by an extra-terrestrial engineer. 

A photograph of Pioneer 10, showing the plaque in place

It may well be that an advanced extra-terrestrial being would be able to visualise whole cultures and species types by analysing patterns of making revealed in the making of any object and that by looking at the way the Pioneer was engineered would be able to deduce the evolution of the creatures that built it. If so it could also be important to this creature to provide for itself an aesthetic framework within which to view this new knowledge. Because of its own evolutionary history it might well take a deep interest in insect or crustacea evolution and accompanying structural and aesthetic possibilities and decide that all terrestrial evolution is based on the structure of a flea or shrimp.

Robert Hooke: Drawing of a flea: 1665

Diagram of Evolutionary links that suggests that evolution from a distance is very shrimp like

It is most likely that this alien creature will have evolved in such a way that it understands itself as part of an always changing set of relationships. It will be aware of beginnings, middles and ends of these relationships and that all beginnings and ends are simply moments between changing patterns. The idea that we could communicate with this creature was one you would expect a well known scientist like Sagan to have thought through a little more. In some ways it could be seen as quite funny, but in others it is indicative of the reason why we have managed to get the world into the state it is. As we have come to understand some of the complexities of the physical world, to the extent that we can send a spaceship out into the void, we have at the same time not been able to understand how blinkered our view of ourselves and others is. We designed those figures on that plaque with a certain presumption, one that is beginning 45 years later to unpick itself.  At the same time that many humans are shaving themselves everyday to become hairless like the drawings on the plaque, other humans are being persecuted because they appear to be neither of the two genders represented. The images of the people represented represent a view of humankind that was in fact not very kind, or was somewhat thoughtless.

In the book 'Sum: Tales from the Afterlives', David Eagleman recounts forty stories, each one describing a different afterlife. In his short story 'Microbe'  he gives an account whereby God is discovered to be the God of microbes.

"There is no afterlife for us. Our bodies decompose upon death, and then the teeming floods of microbes living inside us move on to better places. This may lead you to assume that God doesn't exist—but you'd be wrong. It's simply that He doesn't know we exist. He is unaware of us because we're at the wrong spatial scale. God is the size of a bacterium. He is not something outside and above us, but on the surface and in the cells of us.

God created life in His own image; His congregations are the microbes.

The chronic warfare over host territory, the politics of symbiosis and infection, the ascendancy of strains: this is the chessboard of God, where good clashes with evil on the battleground of surface proteins and immunity and resistance".
From 'Sum' by David Eagleman

It is useful to remind ourselves every now and again that there is far more chance that alien life would be more like bacteria than humans. Artificial intelligences are being taught to learn in laboratories all over the world and the more we work with the associated software programming the more we become aware of how blinkered learning actually is. Whatever is taught to an AI becomes the world that the AI exists in and it 'sees' everything else from the point of view from whereby it was fed the initial information. But more on that in the next post.



Sum is available to download here

Some thoughts on communication theory

Drawing and quantum theory: part two

Polar opposite: From a series of drawings of fast disappearing animals

In my last post about sub-atomic particles and drawing, I was hedging around having to try and explain what is normally called quantum theory. So once again I’m going to have a go at trying to communicate what I think a complex scientific principle is and explain how I am trying to use my personal awareness of it (awareness rather than understanding, because I don’t think I have a hope in Hell of really understanding it), to inform my approach to making and thinking about drawing. 

Quantum theory sets out an explanation of the nature and behaviour of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic level. Its history is very interesting because as different scientists have attempted to explain it, our understanding of things such as energy, radiation, mass and matter have needed to change. 

Right at the beginning of the twentieth century the physicist Max Planck first developed a quantum theory. He had set out to understand why radiation from a glowing body changes in colour as it gets hotter. We have all seen this when heating metal, it gets red, then orange, then yellow and then if you can heat it up far enough, it can get to be a blue colour. Think of our sun, this emits radiation and it’s yellow, but if we are in in the DC fictional universe, Superman comes from Krypton, a planet that circles a red sun that must have been cooler. But what is radiation? In Planck’s time it was thought to be a constant electromagnetic wave, but he couldn’t get the maths right when applying that idea to the reason for the change in colours. So he decided to think about the emission of individual units of energy, which he called ‘quanta’. Quanta being a term that covers all sorts of energy, a photon being a quantum of the electromagnetic radiation that we associate with light. (‘Quanta’ is the plural form of ‘quantum’) What had been sorted out during the previous century was that electricity, magnetism and light were all different sorts of electromagnetic radiation and we are now aware that there are waves of energy moving all around us in the form of TV and audio transmissions, gamma radiation from space, light and heat in the atmosphere, x-rays etc. Scientists understand them all as electromagnetic radiation, their waves of energy being called electromagnetic because they have oscillating electric and magnetic fields.

But we need to go back in time a little to sort out how these what appear to be very different things were seen to be all related. 

But first of all there is that diagram that I’m sure many of you have seen before that shows how the various types of electromagnetic field are related. The visible light spectrum is enlarged because it is the one most important to us. 

Electromagnetic spectrum

It was James Clark Maxwell who first unified the fields of electricity, magnetism and optics. He described light as a propagating wave of electric and magnetic fields. My understanding of propagating is that it refers to something’s ability to transmit something, or bring something forth (like a new plant) in this case light, through a medium. So this particular wave carries light, whilst others carry for instance radio waves. But I also think this is a problem with words, I cant see how a field can also be a propagating wave through a medium, unless the field is its own medium, within which the photon moves. 

I think it is reasonably easy to visualise the relationship between electricity and magnetism because we have all seen experiments such as the moving of a magnet over a wire to induce an electric current. The one seems to be caused by the other and vice versa. 

Maxwell relied on Faraday’s visualisation of magnetic and electrical forces as being like fields that extend into space. These fields allow for the transmission of forces to other charges. Such as in a magnet positively charged elements will head towards a negative charge. 

Faraday visualised electric charges as producing fieldsthat extend through space and which transmit electric and magnetic forces to other distant charges. But he had to visualise a field, so I can sort of see another word based problem. I think of farmers’ fields as extending to two dimensions, but these ‘fields’ must be far more complicated than that. So how did Faraday think of fields? The term was originally used in mathematics to represent any physical quantity whose value changes from one point in space to another. So and I’m sure I will have got this wrong, if I want to measure the average temperature of lets say a brick, there would be lots of different temperatures to measure, all of which would be contributing to something I could call the overall temperature. For instance a point in shadow near the brick’s surface might be cooler than another point in full sunlight, but colder than a point near the bottom of the brick. This would mean that I am specifying a distribution of numbers, one for each spatial point. The temperature “field” would therefore be an accounting of those numbers. As a visual person, I could visualise this as a three-dimensional graph, having x, y and x axes.  In this way I could think about a field as an expression of the spatial coordinates. The temperature would however be constantly changing, the brick being much colder at night, so the field would also vary with time.  If a field is expressed as a function of spatial coordinates together with time it would look like this as an equation; T(x, y, z, t), where T is the temperature field, x, y, and z are the spatial coordinates, and t is the time. But electrical fields flow and bricks don’t. 

How to plot a vector within three dimensional axes

Plotting velocities using vectors

Using vectors to visualise changes in a fluid

If you want to work out the mathematics of things that move, you use vectors, because if things are moving they don’t have a fixed position, but they do have magnitude and direction at each point in space as they move. When measuring the temperature of the brick we were using a scalar method or way of measuring a fixed single measurable entity. A bit like using bit maps to draw with on a computer instead of vector graphics. Vector graphics are comprised of paths, which are defined by start and end points. (See this earlier post) Because they are not made up of a specific number of dots, they can be scaled to a larger size and not lose any image quality. I know it might feel that I’m drifting off the point here but bare with me, because from what I can see so much of what science at this level is about is metaphor, trying to grasp something by thinking about something else, so I’m following my nose again and thinking about something else. Unlike raster graphics, vector images are not resolution-dependent. But I feel that I am resolution dependent, in the sense that my scale sits between the tiny sub atomic and the vast operation of stars like the sun. Vector images have no fixed intrinsic resolution, they display at the resolution capability of whatever output devices (monitors or printers) are rendering them. So are vector images a way of thinking about how electromagnetic and other energy fields can operate at both microscopic and cosmic scales? Am I in effect when I try to think of my day to day operation in the world as I think I see it, more like a raster graphic, having to hold on to the contents of millions of tiny bits of information, rather than being shaped by an idea of an energy field, an idea that can be applied at both macro and micro levels. Is this why everything around me gets fuzzy edges when I begin to look closely at them? 

“It’s not what it is but where it is”, was a favourite phrase of myself and other drawing tutors during the time I was teaching students to draw from observation. Drawing accurately was about searching for points in space. Drawing with an attention to your perceptual awareness within this process was about recognising how eye and body movement caused a constant repositioning of relationships, therefore all you could actually draw was the record of the search for something that could by definition never be found. When you are looking to measure movement in space, a vector can deal with speed, as well as direction, something that I had not really thought about when undertaking those now distant drawing classes. The speed of the two eyes’ sweep through a space and of their scan of the objects and their relationships was not something we considered, it was simply taken for granted that a constant oscillation of movement was the actual state within which the situation of looking existed. We did not treat the world as something that consisted of static lumps, but we did ask questions, such as how can mass be visualised on a flat surface? Giacometti was the artist often cited as being someone who understood these things. 

Giacometti

Going back to the world of mathematics, if instead of the brick we decide to measure the changing temperatures of a fluid in motion, such as in a flowing stream, or going back to that old life studio, changes in temperature in the air in a room, we would need to use vectors.  

What I find interesting at this point is that by trying to understand what is going on I’m becoming more aware of how important it is that I’m always in motion, and if I step back from the world a little, I can see that everything else is in motion too. There is a wonderful Sam Taylor Wood video of a still life that reveals that a still life is in fact never still. 

Sam Taylor Wood: Still life

When particles interact, their wavefunctions briefly overlap and when this happens these particles are forever linked, and they change their nature, a single wavefunction describing both particles simultaneously, in a process known as "quantum entanglement". When a measurement is taken, it triggers a series of entanglements beginning with the first particle hitting a detector, and ending with molecules shifting around in the brain of the observer to make them consciously aware of what just happened. However every particle in the universe becomes entangled with every other particle, leading to a single universal wavefunction that describes the entirety of the universe. This seems to me to have a direct parallel with looking. As you look what in word descriptions were objects (chairs, carpets, tea cups, plates etc.) become transformed into a single entanglement of shifting light. Scanning eyes picking up a small percentage of this and a brain/body trying to interpret this conglomerate of light emissions in terms of its potential effect on the observer. 

Sam Taylor Wood’s ‘still-life’ is of course about time and the reality is that time is a dimension that non scientists rarely think about at a quantum level. It could be that time is an emergent phenomenon resulting from entanglement, in which different quantum particles effectively share an existence, even though physically separated, so that the quantum state of each particle can only be described relative to the other entangled particles. This entanglement, does seem to keep re-occurring, just as a photon is not a separate particle, it is a flux in an energy field, it is what happens when I take away things and let processes take over. 

A never stillness seems to lie behind the way to think about everything, so I think I need to return to science again. The relationship between optics and electromagnetism is a fundamental one and central to what it means to be a visual artist because vision is itself something that would never have developed if light had not existed. On Earth light from the sun provides energy for all living things, it fact it could be argued that we are just a very strange physical form of the Sun's energy.  So how does the Sun produce light? 

The Sun mainly consists of plasma. Plasma is sometimes called the forth state of matter, (solid, liquid, gas and plasma) and is called plasma because Irving Langmuir who was the first scientist to name it, thought it reminded him of  "the way blood plasma carries red and white corpuscles and germs".  The Latin word plasma was taken from the Greek and meant 'something formed', 'a mouldable substance' or 'jelly', and although I have to keep reminding myself of how words trap you into thinking about things in a certain way, I think this is a useful metaphor to hold on to. In our blood it is the carrier for vital ingredients such as cells and proteins around the body. In the Sun, plasma is in constant movement and acts as both a carrier and emitter of radiation. 

In the Sun’s core energy is produced by hydrogen atoms being converted into the nuclei of helium.  This is actually what is happening when plasma, which occurs when an ionized gaseous substance, in this case hydrogen,  becomes highly electrically conductive to the point that long-range electric and magnetic fields dominate the behaviour of the matter. This is possible thanks to the extreme pressure and temperature that exists within the core. The fusion of four protons (hydrogen nuclei) into one alpha particle, two protons and two neutrons bound together into a particle that is identical to a helium nucleus, releases two positrons, as well as two neutrinos (which changes two of the protons into neutrons), and energy. This energy is electromagnetic and works its way through the Sun’s outer layers getting less powerful as it does so, finally getting to the surface, where it leaves the Sun in the form of radiation. I.e. energy travelling as rays. 

The sun emits all of the different kinds of electromagnetic radiation, (see the chart above) 99% of its rays are though in the form of visible light, ultraviolet rays, and infrared rays (what we call heat).  Energy waves travel out from their source in straight lines, which is why they are also called rays. (These are Maxwell’s travelling harmonic waves) The confusion is that energy is sent out as a wave, even though it travels in straight lines, this is called the rectilinear propagation of light. But now I think it gets hard to think about. I have tended to think of photons as being particles of light, but now understand that there are no such things as particles, just bundles of energy, so a photon would bethe quantum of the electromagnetic field, or the force carrier or mover within the electromagnetic force. But it looks as if the scientists want to deal with it as both a particle and a wave. Again it’s a problem with words, if the situation is thought of as a certain moment in a series of events we call light, perhaps it’s easier to reconcile, but this does mean including time as a constant factor and therefore movement, in the way we think of everything. 

It is as if our way of ‘knowing’ is being challenged, and my guess is that it has always been the case, because if there are so many energy states interpenetrating my existence, including the energy state that is myself, there must be a sort of built in awareness that allows me to navigate life, because I am just one example of a species that has developed out of many other species over millions of years. This could be very similar to the way that some birds navigate by being able to detect the nonlocal quantum signature of electromagnetic waves. The protein that apparently allows this to happen, it has been theorised, can be found in all living creatures that have evolved to move over distances. Perhaps this is something we have lost the ability to use, but which occasionally trips into our awareness. This could be why we hear echoes of things that aren’t there, intimations of other presences, or portents that drive us to make decisions about which we have no real understanding as to why, things that Janice Radway points to in her introduction to Avery F. Gordon’s ‘Ghostly Matters’, whereby she makes the point that we need to develop a way of negotiating between what we see and what we know and I would add what we feel or tacitly grasp to be the case. This shadow world is usually associated with the subconscious but perhaps this is the way things are, the subconscious being like the awareness of subatomic electromagnetic fields, more to do with being a process than a thing. 

But here is the maths, here is the stuff that I’m also suspicious of, because of the way I think it suggests its own answers. In copying this information from the web I’ve tried to leave in the hyper-links so that you can follow the detail. 

What Maxwell did was to show that electromagnetic waves describe propagating oscillations in the strengths of electric and magnetic fields. Maxwell’s wave equation showed that the speed of the waves, labeled c, is determined by a combination of constants in the laws of electrostatics and magnetostatics. This is the equation that demonstrates that this is the case:

Where ε0, the permittivity of free space, has an experimentally determined value of 8.85 × 10−12 square coulomb per newton square metre, and μ0, the magnetic permeability of free space, has a value of 1.26 × 10−6 newton square seconds per square coulomb. 

The calculated speed, about 3 × 108 metres per second, agreed with the known speed of light, and led Maxwell to conclude that, light itself—including radiant heat and other radiation, is an electromagnetic disturbance in the form of waves propagated through the electro-magnetic field according to electro-magnetic laws.

So here we have the bringing together of a whole series of things that previously were separate, and more recently spacetime itself has been described as a product of the entanglement between objects. It does appear as if gradually everything dissolves into everything else and if so, this helps me as a maker of images to think about their nature and how I try to control them or not, as they arrive. Whether I am drawing in three dimensions in clay or in two on paper, the same issues haunt me. How does the process itself reflect what it is to be alive, to be entangled in the now of existence and yet recognise links to the past and create a space within which to meditate upon possible futures? Conundrums indeed, but ones that are central to this type of thinking. Dualities seem to abound in contemporary thinking, not least the ones I used to find fascinating when I was reading Hegel.  

Thinking of dualities the 'is light a particle or a wave?' issue became even more problematic when  Heisenberg proved that precise, simultaneous measurement of the position and momentum of a subatomic particle was impossible. The more precisely one value is measured, the more flawed will be the measurement of the other value. This is the uncertainty principle, which became a very important part of what we now know as quantum theory. 

The two interpretations of quantum theory that develop the implications of the uncertainty principle are the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds theory. Niels Bohr proposed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which asserts that a particle is whatever it is measured to be (for example, a wave or a particle), but that it cannot be assumed to have specific properties, or even to exist, until it is measured. Bohr was therefore suggesting that objective reality does not exist. This translates to a principle called superposition that claims that while we do not know what the state of any object is, it is actually in all possible states simultaneously, as long as we don't look to check. The analogy of Schrodinger's Cat is often used to illustrate this idea. Place a live cat in a thick lead box, inside of which is an unbroken glass cyanide capsule and seal the box. We can’t know if the cat is alive or if the cyanide capsule has broken and the cat has died. Since we do not know, the cat is both dead and alive, according to quantum law, it is in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and see what condition the cat is in that the superposition is lost, and the cat must be either alive or dead.

Schrodinger's bears

Schrodinger put a cat in the box to test his theory, he was as human as the rest of us and was quite happy to use another animal instead of a human being. The problem is that we have been putting animals to the test for too many years. Our heavy use of pesticides now decimating the world's insect population, which could be seen as a very slow form of suicide. On the cosmic scale of things I doubt this matters, the Earth is a tiny mote within a universe far too large for us to comprehend. But if we look at anything closely enough it looks just like us and how would we think of a thought experiment of such dramatic possibilities if it was called Schrodinger's son. 

The second interpretation of quantum theory is the many-worlds or multiverse theory. It holds that as soon as a potential exists for any object to be in any state, the universe of that object transmutes into a series of parallel universes equal to the number of possible states in which that the object can exist, with each universe containing a unique single possible state of that object. Furthermore, there is a mechanism for interaction between these universes that somehow permits all states to be accessible in some way and for all possible states to be affected in some manner. 

This seems to me to be scientists trying to avoid the problem, perhaps what they are really saying is, 'we don’t know the answer'. The fact that all of this stuff only applies to the 5% of the universe that we can access, also suggests that when and if we begin to understand what the other 95% of dark matter and dark energy consists of, we may well find that everything is interconnected and that a common belief in ghosts and other such phenomena has roots in those somethings that we just feel are there but cant experience empirically. 

Quantum vanitas

Which brings me back to drawing and drawing’s ability to take us places where logic doesn’t go. I’m not going to argue that drawing in some way taps into other possible worlds or existences, but I will suggest that what drawing can do is allow you to take flight, allow you to become lost in the absorbsion of doing and in that absorbsion perhaps you might be able to tap into fields of energy, in a way unavailable to words or mathematical equations. After all if bees, like dolphins can understand the concept of zero and use what seems like maths to solve problems, we may well have over estimated our skill base. Perhaps what we are missing is simply that bees are more perceptually attuned to magnetic or other fields and from their point of view we are bee-blind. 

Diagram from an article looking at the map-like spatial memory of a bee, suggesting that a bee dance is like a drawing whereby they are mapping territory. 

In my own work I often find I am wondering through space directed by something I'm unsure of. I believe that I am magnetically charged and in that charge sometimes I find a form.

Drawing in a quantum library

Artists looking to develop structures based on the implications of mathematical forms as indicated by this type of investigation often move into animation. Equilibrium by Memo Akten is a good example of this type of controlled response to the implications of mathematical possibilities. 

References

If you want to read about birds and their ability to tap into magnetic fields, this is one of several articles on the subject: A Pauls, James & Zhang, Yiteng & Berman, G & Kais, Sabre. (2013). Quantum Coherence and Entanglement in the Avian Compass. Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics. 87. 062704. 10.1103/PhysRevE.87.062704.

Honey bees navigate according to a map-like spatial memory: Find the article on honey bees here:  Randolf Menzel, Uwe Greggers, Alan Smith, Sandra Berger, Robert Brandt,Sascha Brunke, Gesine Bundrock, Sandra Hülse, Tobias Plümpe, FrankSchaupp, Elke Schüttler, Silke Stach, Jan Stindt, Nicola Stollhoff, SebastianWatzl Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Feb 2005, 102 (8) 3040-3045; DOI:10.1073/pnas.0408550102

See also: 

Points, dots and spots 
Drawing and quantum theory part one
Faraday's lines of force
Qualia

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.