Beauty and uncertainty - the art of science

‘Data becomes sensation’ in Halo.  Photo: Claudia Marcelloni CERN

Wonderment, beauty, uncertainty. These are the qualities that scientists repeatedly cite as being at the heart of their work. We see how these elements are to the fore in an article on an effort to translate the findings of astrophysicists into forms that the general public can appreciate, revealing the "frameworks" scientists use to understand their data. 

Halo is an art installation produced by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, artists who like to dramatise extreme cosmic events with visual aids. In their latest effort they have converted raw data culled from subatomic particle collisions at Cern in Switzerland, where they have been working as artists, into a melange of light, sound and curious tactile effects. “We have put data into a form where you can feel it,” says Jarman. “Data becomes sensation.”

Inside Halo, 384 vertical wires are arranged in a circle surrounding visitors, each throbbing out the patterns of data in sync with the lights. If you touch a resonating wire, you can convince yourself you’re feeling the universe coming into being. 

Jarman says Cern scientists have welled up on stepping into Halo, apparently perceiving in it a simulation of the elegance they find in equations and theories. “For me,” says Professor Antonella De Santo, the Sussex University physicist involved in the project, “this is the first time I have sensed the scientific beauty I experience in my career in artistic form.”

[Halo is about] getting humans to experience what goes on beyond the limits of human experience, the vast forces of nature operating on Earth and beyond, or shifting the imponderables of quantum physics into visual and auditory form.

Neither Jarman or Gerhardt have scientific backgrounds. Rather, they are making a kind of outsider science art. That outsider perspective gives them a refreshing sense of what science amounts to. “We think of science as all about facts,” says Jarman. “But what are facts? And what is data? A lot of what scientists know is more like fiction. What we’re doing is revealing their frameworks in a way that everyone can understand. Without a framework, we couldn’t know anything. But that framework isn’t fixed. It’s unfinished business.”

Professor De Santo agrees. “The best scientists are humble. They don’t presume to know everything. They live in uncertainty.” Indeed, for her that humble stance is what guides her work, which is at the cutting edge of the new physics that goes beyond what is known as the Standard Model. That model, she explains, told us there were 17 building blocks of nature: six quarks, six leptons, four force-carrier particles, and the Higgs boson. “But it was incomplete. It didn’t include gravity. It said neutrinos don’t have mass, which they do. And it didn’t include dark matter. I don’t believe in a theory of everything. I’m not arrogant enough to suppose we will ever know everything.”

This blog has several posts on the beauty of the world around us, as well as the degree of ignorance that remains as to how the world works. I invite you to check out the archive using the menu on the right.

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