Art and Science Are a Means to One End

We recently had a chance to chat with Mark McCaughrean, the Senior Science Advisor in the European Infinite Agency'south Directorate of Scientific discipline, about the ESA's upcoming activities. Now, in Role ii of our interview, nosotros take a quantum leap into a word of how fine art and science tin engage in reciprocal inspiration, and we also posed a few fundamental questions: Can we human beings actually deal with the cognition that there are and then many worlds of possibilities "out in that location" across our planet? How do we explicate things to ourselves that nosotros might never sympathize? And what most the representations of this unitary universe that we've rendered specially for the purpose of even beingness able to behold it with our own eyes—aren't they actually but a falsified reality? These might too be the issues that artists will be coming to terms with in autumn 2016 when, nether the auspices of the European Digital Art and Scientific discipline Network, they go the extraordinary opportunity to spend a residency at the European Infinite Enquiry and Applied science Center in Holland and at the Ars Electronica Futurelab. There are all the same a few days remaining until the application deadline: June 20, 2016. Get to ars.electronica.fine art/artandscience and now put yourself in a position for huge things to happen:

A star is born… Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, K. Stapelfeldt (GSFC), B. Stecklum & A. Choudhary (Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Germany)

You are a passionate photographer and an astrophysicist; at piece of work you are as well combining fine art and science. How do these ii fields benefit from each other in your opinion?

Mark McCaughrean: I've always felt that this aesthetic effect is very important, as a complement to the science. My own personal science research has generally been linked with imaging, taking pictures of the heaven. And very ofttimes not at visible wavelengths, but in the infrared, looking at heat radiation that can come up from very afar galaxies or young stars and planets in the process of existence built-in. That's the reason I've been involved in the James Webb Space Telescope for a long time because information technology's going to be the most powerful infrared telescope ever built, and will permit u.s. to become unprecedented views of these phenomena.

But because I've been involved in infrared astronomy my whole career, I've likewise had a longstanding interest in the aesthetics of how we represent how the Universe looks at wavelengths that are really invisible to u.s.a.. Obviously, that's not really necessary when you lot're doing science, measuring the brightness and spectral characteristics of objects to determine their concrete characteristics, simply you tin can go beyond and brand pictures that are highly highly-seasoned to us every bit humans. At that indicate, lots of questions about the nature of reality and aesthetics are raised.

The Eagle Nebula, Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/How-do-you-do-GAL Project

Through both my scientific work and normal photography', I have an interest in images and what images mean, how people respond to images, how information and emotions can be transmitted. For instance, the orientation of an astronomical image is essentially capricious, but you tin can rotate it through 90 degrees and of a sudden it changes because it might resemble something with resonance to a human that it did non earlier. It does non alter in space, merely information technology of a sudden somehow connects with humans and man experiences.

The aforementioned goes for colour. Typically we take images through 3 different filters at dissimilar wavelengths and combine them as ruddy, green, and bluish, to make something that brand something we can wait at visually. Obviously, if you have pictures at wavelengths that are invisible to humans, the all-time you lot can get are representative colours', some idea of what's redder' or bluer' in a relative sense, without it being what the human being eye would run into.

If you motility to the visible and use filters that lucifer the response of the homo eye, merely the thought that this is what you'd see if yous were much closer' tin can exist misleading. That's because the human eye isn't very sensitive and many things in space are rather faint, only activating our colour-insensitive rods, making everything await grey. If nosotros were to wing in a spaceship closer to the Orion Nebula, for example, it would get bigger, but information technology wouldn't become any brighter (for the same reasons that a bare white wall doesn't get brighter as we walk towards it, just bigger), and so even if we were correct next to it, it'd still expect grey to the naked eye.

So when we brand color images in astronomy, we use our telescopes to collect more light and paradigm processing to balance everything out, to bring things above the threshold where our color-sensitive cones are activated: essentially, we amp upwards the colours. To confuse matters farther though, we often employ very narrow filters that focus on strong emission from i or other spectral line from hot gas in a nebula. Putting three of these together can make a very hit prototype, but it's a bad match to the rather broad response of the human center, and thus not what we'd see.

Ultimately, the key question is why we find some of these images and so aesthetically appealing, despite the fact that they're not necessarily what we'd run into if we were floating out in space. Office of this is because nosotros're stimulated by the intellectual wonder of it all, knowledge about the Universe that surrounds us, but equally considering they strike a chord with man experiences of nature here on Globe, of the sea, fire, the sky, flowers, forests and jungles, wild animals, things that accept zero to practise with infinite per se, just that are about u.s.a. and our long evolution on this planet.

A section of the Orion Nebula. Credit: ESA/PACS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/IRAM

So art is a mode to look at scientific discipline from a different angle?

Mark McCaughrean: Often, scientific measurements can be fabricated more easily understood by humans by using creative techniques, and there'southward a whole burgeoning field dealing with visualisation, many of them collaborations between scientists, data geeks, and artists. Nosotros've been working with some of these folk and it tin be very productive.

Just fine art in a purer sense tin bring enormous insights to our visceral understanding of physical phenomena, concepts, and ideas. An creative person might await completely sideways at the field of study and say: "Yes, I understand, this is scientific discipline, it is important to me considering information technology has a scientific significant, but can I say something else almost it which is closer to the human being experience?"

For example, we take been working with the artist Ekaterina Smirnova. She has fabricated a series of painting of Comet 67P/C-K that Rosetta is flight around. They are not authentic in the sense that she has tried to replicate every crater, cliff, and boulder, but through her dynamic manner, she has captured the essence of the comet in a very beautiful, almost emotional way. She has also linked her work back to the science in a conceptual way.

One of the key early on measurements made of the comet was of its h2o content, to see how like it is to water on the Globe, with the question in heed "could the Earth's h2o take been delivered here by comets raining down on the surface?" You tin report this past measuring how much heavy h2o there is mixed in with normal water, that is, water where one of the hydrogen atoms has been replaced by a heavier isotope called deuterium. In that location's a trivial bit of that in every glass of water you drink and everywhere you drink the water, it is the aforementioned amount — whether you're in Linz or Amsterdam or wherever. On Earth, information technology is always the same fraction.

But when Rosetta measured the amount of deuterium in the comet's h2o, information technology was constitute to exist three times college. Ekaterina wanted to build that into her art, and so she bought some heavy h2o over the internet and added into her watercolour painting water in merely the right proportion to simulate 67P/C-Grand water. Yous can't see it in her paintings, y'all tin can't smell it, and you tin can't taste it, just conceptually, the art and science combine to brand a statement, considering we know it'south in at that place. That was an idea nosotros did not retrieve of it at all, but it came to her. That's why nosotros enjoy working with artists on these things, because they can bring a totally new, inspiring perspective.

You've spent many years with looking into the depths of space. What thoughts and emotions exercise you regularly accept while watching these images from outer space?

Marking McCaughrean: (laughs) You know, like for almost people, a chore is a job and sometimes it's easy to lose perspective and focus on the mundane side of it. But I notice it important to step dorsum and think how lucky I am to exist able to piece of work in this remarkable field. Fortunately, I get to give many public talks about what we do, and that becomes evident from the response of the audience.

Equally an astronomer, I've seen things no homo has always seen earlier. With my colleagues, I've made new discoveries, using new telescopes or a new instrument, or just by looking at a previously unstudied place in the sky. Out of billions of people and over thousands of years of human history, knowing that you're the first to see a new young star, a planetary system in the making, or a giant jet of high-speed gas spanning light years, brings intense intellectual and emotional pleasure, as well equally a sense of mental vertigo as you effort to imagine the distance, the power, and the timescales involved in these phenomena.

In fact, it's close to incommunicable for humans to fully capeesh these things. To the nearest lodge of magnitude, we're around a metre in size, 100 kilograms in mass, can motion at around a metre per second, experience fourth dimension on a second-to-second basis, and live most 100 years. Nosotros've evolved to cope with phenomena on these scales and thus it's very difficult for u.s. to truly grasp the sizes, speeds, timescales, and energies involved at planetary, stellar, galactic, or universe levels. We tin can extrapolate, make comparisons, scale things upwardly with maths, but in reality, we simply cannot appreciate these things.

The milky way and our Blue Planet, Credit: ESA/NASA

And beyond that, there are cardinal phenomena like breakthrough mechanics and relativity that can't but be scaled upward or downwards, that make no sense at all with respect to human experience. It's a remarkable testament to the flexibility and ingenuity of our brains that nosotros have uncovered these disquisitional rules of the Universe and that we can manipulate and employ them intellectually via mathematics. Merely to say that nosotros truly understand them, that we feel them; that's incommunicable.

Nosotros're yet but primates, even if fairly smart ones, and our nearly basic instinctual appreciation of the earth stems from that. We're designed to react to large cats jumping out at usa unexpectedly. Nosotros respond to a storm coming over the horizon, to hunger, to cold, to the demand for companionship. Why would nosotros have any understanding of the way tiny, invisible particles interact? Until very recently, we've merely not needed information technology, and so nosotros oasis't ever evolved an innate understanding of it, the way nosotros just know that big cats tin be dangerous.

As a primate, why would I worry about protons? Just here we are, in just the concluding hundred years or and so, knowing that protons exist, and with a pretty good understanding of how they work. And conversely, why would protons and the rules that govern them and the rest of physics care about us? This knowledge very recent appreciation of the Universe and our part in it, but as well peradventure of how irrelevant we are in the thou scheme of things, brings on this weird mental vertigo. A visual metaphor might be the technique called a "dolly zoom" in motion-picture show-making, where the camera moves towards the bailiwick on a dolly while the lens is simultaneously zoomed out. This maintains the subject, typically a person, at a fixed scale, while the surroundings change size and perspective completely. It can be quite unsettling.

"In some ways, part of being a scientist is that while you experience you're getting closer and closer to the real story, y'all as well develop a new perspective, realising that you're also getting further from information technology in some ways. You offset to understand how little nosotros really sympathize."

Only we are nevertheless looking for answers fifty-fifty if we may not sympathise them completely…

Mark McCaughrean: Certain, we're driven by a curiosity that is innate, that is a fundamental role of what it means to exist human. Merely perchance astronomers are peculiarly lucky in some sense, because nosotros get to study the biggest pic of them all. In that location's a very famous site from artifact at Delphi in Greece, where the oracle was consulted on of import issues. It's also held to be the centre of the world, the omphalos or "omphalos", the place where legend has information technology that two eagles met after Zeus sent them flying, one eastwards, one westwards. The same word lies at the root of the term omphaloskeptics', people that gaze inwards at their navels equally a manner of meditating on the cosmos.

I call astronomers inverse omphaloskeptics'. Instead of gazing inwards at our navels, we sit at the eye of the Universe in some sense, looking out at the residuum of it, trying to sympathise it all. Nosotros tin can do that with our telescopes and complex machinery, or we can just lie down on the grass nether a clear, night sky and stare upwardly at the stars. To begin with, they look like they're painted on a ceiling a few hundred metres above, but at some point your brain engages and says "no, they're many trillions of kilometres away": the perspective that brings can be impressive and scary.

Impressive and scary. Credit: NASA & ESA

The stars don't print my cat in the same way; he senses many things about the globe that I don't, but I don't think he has whatsoever concept of the wider Universe. But knowing of this vastness and of our own insignificance is one thing; do we actually empathize it? In the end, the disconnection that that noesis exposes is part of the homo status. This is where art comes in, as it can assist us span that gap in an emotional style.

Nosotros've talked near paintings, but we've also been working with musicians over the last few years as well. Thanks to Rosetta, we've had people composing classical symphonic suites, prog rock concept albums, film music, avant garde piano music. They're all trying to capture the inspiration that the mission has brought to them, using music to evoke those emotions.

"This is mayhap where art and science intersect, at the point where we come to terms with what information technology means to be human, to lead a brief, insignificant existence in a vast uncaring Universe. Both are attempts to bring some sense and understanding to this, and then I call back information technology's only natural that they come together, equally in our joint ESA-Ars Electronica residency."

And don't forget—you still have until June xx, 2016 to apply for a residency at the ESA and at the Ars Electronica Futurelab. To get the details and submit an application, go to ars.electronica.art/artandscience!

Prof Marker McCaughrean works for the European Space Agency, where he is the Senior Scientific Advisor in the Directorate of Science, responsible for communicating the scientific results from ESA's astronomy, heliophysics, planetary, and fundamental physics missions. Post-obit his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1988, he has worked in the Britain, the US, Germany, and the Netherlands. His personal research involves observational studies of the formation of stars and their planetary systems using state-of-the-art ground- and space-based telescopes. He is an Interdisciplinary Scientist on the Science Working Group for the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.

oleshoster.blogspot.com

Source: https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2016/06/16/what-does-it-mean-to-be-human/