I’ve always been marginally interested in the intersection between science and religion — I think in part because I do have a strong spiritual connection to the world, but through my awe in the workings of the natural world.  I’ve been told by a Christian that I worship the “created” (i.e., the natural world and all its wonders) rather than the Creator (i.e., God).  Yet, I have a deep and abiding respect for other people and their beliefs, especially after my time in a small village in Africa.  I’m not religious, but I am spiritual, and interested in where there are intersections between how I see the world, and how so many others do.    So when I was recently sent  The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate (by Adam Frank, an astronomer and writer) to take a look and write about it on the blog, I was curious about it.  It took me a long time to get around to it, but here’s my take on it.

Overall, the book had some really interesting ideas.  The basic premise was that science and religion needn’t be at odds, as they are now (and indeed, the two were not always at “war”) because they are both serving the same basic human desire.  That desire is the urge to understand the world around us and to touch the “divine” or “sacred” — the part of the world that is outside our mundane experience .

The constant fire is the aspiration to know what is essential, what is real, what is true.  It emerges from the elemental experience of the world as sacred.  Mythic narratives are one expression of that aspiration.  Scientific narratives are another.

So, since both science and religion/myth come from the same wellspring origin, they’re not necessarily in conflict.  Regardless of whether you buy his argument (and I bet many religious people have a strong reaction to the equating of religious stories with “myth”), he does have some great history of scientific accounts throughout.  My main beef with the book was that I felt that I got the main point in the first chapter and didn’t get too much out of the rest of the book — it didn’t need to be so long.  But, hey, if you’re grooving on it, I guess you’d be glad that he went into the detail and different examples that he did.

I got particularly interested about halfway through, when he began to describe how both science and religion contain their own narrative structure.  As a science writer and educator, I’ve been drawn to the idea of narrative and story.  The best communication of science, in any venue, is a weaving of a story.  Presentation of data at a conference, an article written for the public, or a lecture in a university — if there is not a narrative arc, your audience is likely to get lost. “There is no meaning in the data by themselves,” he writes.  They’re just numbers, and we seek meaning by looking for patterns in the numbers.

The world gives us data.  We look for patterns.  Then we find a reason for the pattern, and that reason becomes a story.

For example, he describes the currently understood account of how the universe came to be, from the Big Bang to present day.  We create a narrative based on the data and the patterns it presents.  And he describes creation stories from various cultures.  These are two perspectives on the question of “how did we come to be here?”

Myths are stories because that is how human beings create meaning.  Stories are how we structure our response to experiences of the world’s sacred character.

Both creation myths and stories, and scientific accounts of the origin of the universe, bring us outside our mundane experience of the world and closer to the sense of awe of how the world is. Scientific data, for example, takes us that much closer to the sacred by providing us with different sacred experiences, “from satellite images of the earth at night to PET scans of the human brain.”  So, science is a gateway to a deep and moving experience of the world.  I liked this thread very much.

I’m not sure yet what I think of Joseph Campbell, but Adam Frank describes his work about the universality of myths.  For example, there are numerous stories of a great flood that wipes out mankind, due to humanity’s folly.  I’m sure Frank isn’t the first to point this out, but the current climate change concern has this same narrative thread — we will be done in by our own actions.  I’m not trying to cast any doubt on climate change (i.e., it’s not a myth), but recognizing this similarity between the ideas of climate change and flood myths is very interesting to me.  We do have a collective sense of guilt (or, at least people in my demographic do) and of impending doom.  Global warming has become a moral issue — a now important part of that story.

Another aspect that I enjoyed about the book was an idea, towards the end, about how mathematics and myth are both expressions of how our brain works.  Our brain seeks patterns, and thus invented both mathematics and myth.   In this way, he says, “there is no separate truth ‘out there’, no realm of archetypes and Platonic forms.”  So, both myth and mathematics are the brain’s response to the physical world.

For those who want a nice summary of the main ideas of the book, he gives a handy list for those of us who got lost in his meanderings:

1. Warfare is not the only way to tell the story of science and religion
2. The emphasis on results in science and religion is misguided and sterile
3. Religious experience is more important than religious doctrine in thinking about connections with science
4. Science, in its practice and fruits, manifests hierophanies (sacred character)
5. Science functions as myth in providing hierophanies through sacred narratives of the cosmos and our place within it
6. Science’s roots in myth reveal its living connections with spiritual endeavor
7. Transcendent realities may or may not exist but are not necessary for science to be recognized as a means to apprehend the sacred
8. The braiding of science and spiritual endeavor by means of their common roots in myth can support a global ethos for the application of science as we pass through the bottleneck of the next century.

So, overall, I liked many of these ideas but wasn’t transported by the book.  Maybe it’s one of the cases of “If you like this sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing you’ll like.”

These publishers were smart.  They sent it to several other bloggers (like Science after Sunclipse and Fine Structure) and the book has its own blog too.  Great way to advertise a book.  So if you want to see what others are saying about it, just Google.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

One of the things that I miss most about the Bay Area is the intensive culture of geekery and delightful playfulness that goes with the unabashed celebration of membership in the pocket protector set.  I invited Alan Rorie — an artist and a scientist at the Exploratorium (who happens to hold my old job) — to present to our seminar group at the University of Colorado.  He gave a wonderful presentation about how the science/art connection in the Bay Area has shaped his transition from scientist to artist.

Here is a link to his presentation (which was made with a wonderful new tool called Prezi — I have to try this out).

In the Bay Area there are many venues where you can express your creative scientific side:

Maker Faire “Burning Man for science geeks”

Maker Faire is an event created by Make Magazine to “celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset.  The annual Maker Faire attracts thousands of amateur inventors and scientists, displaying their home-made prototypes and gadget hacks. In a world where the technological race is speeding up, the Maker movement has revealed that the do-it-yourself culture is in no danger of dying out.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

The Crucible and the Fire Arts Festival

The Crucible is a non-profit educational facility that fosters a collaboration of Arts, Industry and Community. Through training in the fine and industrial arts, The Crucible promotes creative expression, reuse of materials and innovative design while serving as an accessible arts venue for the general public.

And of course Burning Man.   It’s more than just a party in the desert, it’s a huge community-driven art installation, many with tech/science aesthetic and aspects.

And then a bunch of small art/science endeavors and workshops, such as

False Profit Labs

The mission of False Pro?t Labs is to create better art through science. We are art engineers who fabricate, machine, weld, and construct sculptural, larger-than-life art installations designed to create inspiring experiences for spectators and participants.

Laughing Squid

Laughing Squid is an online resource for art, culture & technology

NIMBY

A place to create the impossible, the new, the ridiculous, the exiting and most importantly, the never seen before. It is the largest do-it-yourself industrial art space in the Bay Area with over 40 different art groups and craftsmen in the shop.

Dorkbot

People doing strange things with electricity

What I think that all these environments have in common is that it democratizes science and art.  These become something that everyone can participate in.  Alan made the point that these are inclusive communities.  I think this is important in terms of people’s empowerment to both create and to understand science, technology, and aesthetics.  It creates a culture of geek chic, an inventor/DIY culture and garage science that attracts and involves people who might never go to a science museum or a university — the culturally accepted bastions of science education.  It also engages the mind and brings us wonder in a way that we might not experience through more didactic and authoritarian presentations of science and technology.

Alan really emphasized this inclusive nature of these communities, where we are encouraged to participate and share, and collaboration between artists and scientists is encouraged through openness and communication.  His art particularly focuses on creating fake, fantastical machines that are made to look real (such as the Neuron Chamber and the Dihemispheric Chronaether Agitator).  His works have a heavy physical presence, with mechanical bolts, fasteners, and welding.  His website is at almostscientific.com.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

I’m not a big art fan. I mean, I have nothing against it.  I guess it’s like pot — fine for other people, but it just doesn’t move me.  Though art, at least, doesn’t (usually) make me keep looking back over my shoulder and laugh nervously.

Anyway.  But I do have an aesthetic drug of choice — a certain kind of playful art having to do with stuff. That illuminates, or plays with, some aspect of the world.  Here is an example — one of Arthur Ganson’s machines.

One of the things that I find so delightful about this is both (a) the visual aesthetics of the objects and their movement (what a beautiful chair!), and (b) the self-referential nature of the thing itself.  Here is a massive machine whose sole purpose is to pick up a chair and return it, gracefully, from whence it came.  How ticklish.

And yes, of course, Ganson has worked with the Exploratorium as an art fellow, notably creating the Chain Reaction exhibit.

Here’s another thing I like — Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures that walk in the wind.

Again, I feel delighted.  This is a technological marvel, but in this case the complicated structure is intended to play with, and iluminate, the natural forces of the wind.  The way that it is powered, rather than its intention, is what causes me to feel a fuzzy brain smile.  He gave a TED Talk that I hear is pretty neat.

Here’s another.  I’ve blogged about this one before. This guy does x-rays of everyday objects.  In this case, technology is giving us a literal window into something we can’t usually see… and there is a ghostly aesthetic to these shapes. I feel a certain calmness in these images (perhaps because they’re static, not kinetic as the previous examples). It’s almost zen.

And one last one — I’ve written about Ned Kahn’s work several times. Here’s one example of his work, which generally uses some simple mechanism to illuminate the natural world, generally to show something that is usually unseen.  He is painting with simpler materials than any of the other artists, and the results are much more fluid.  The aesthetics are not shapes, or function, but rather the curious and ever-changing dynamics and patterns that arise.  His installations are deceptively easy, but they are fine tuned to a very delicate point to get just the effect that he wants.  He got a genius award, after all.

So, what am I trying to say through showing these works?  I think that was makes me feel joy in these works is that there is some illumination, or utilization, of something real.  Paintings, in general, reflect the perspective and talent of that particular artist.  I have an abstract appreciation of that.  But I’m not moved by it.  And I think that is the essential thing – that these artistic works make me FEEL something.  And if science and technologically oriented art can make people feel some positive emotion — like awe, wonder, delight, joy, or amusement — that is very powerful.

And good.  Think of the type of emotion that we feel, instead, in response to images of disaster, suffering, poverty, and war.   The stuff of everyday journalism.  In fact, the new psychology of positive emotions suggests that (duh) positive emotions help us flourish and add a lot to our lives.

So, this art adds a lot to my life. So did my experience at the Exploratorium, where I experienced, daily, wonder and delight.

What delights you?

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

I was recently reminded of this wonderful visualization of the processes inside the cell.  As a physicist, I found this quite powerful in imagining this mysterious (and usually, to me, boring) microscopic world.  It was created by a Harvard professor in conjunction with a scientific animation company.  Here’s the video:

In my art and science visualization seminar we had quite an energetic discussion about this video, however.  There seemed to be a lot of skepticism in the room about this visualization.  “It’s not art,” claimed the artists in the room, and the scientists (who were not biologists) were suspicious of its scientific content.  I’m here thinking this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and they’re tearing it apart.  What gives?  Are we distrustful of something that looks slick and expensive, as opposed to something homegrown?  I haven’t seen such resistance to people’s aesthetic garage experiments.  Perhaps because the garage experiments are simply celebrating aesthetics, not trying to convey scientific content.

One aspect of this video, of course, is its emotional content, which can serve to motivate people to learn biology.  It uses different camera angles, an movement, and music, to make the viewer feel that they are zooming around these dynamic views of the inside of the cell.  In terms of how people learn information cognitively, this is also useful. Multiple representations of a phenomenon are very useful in helping people make sense of information.  Most science content is presented quite abstractly.  As our guest speaker Martin Kemp said, this isn’t the science lesson, it’s the teaser.

Certainly, this video doesn’t stand on its own — it needs verbal support.  Presumably an instructor would use it before or after instruction where the content is more explicitly explained.

There is an emotional narrative here, said the seminar participants.  How does that relate to the intellectual narrative.  Does this compromise the science?  One claimed that there is incredible intentionality depicted here.  The processes we see aren’t random, it’s very cooperative, like a small city.  These little things are working very hard to accomplish what they do.  They’re not self-conscious, but still are active agents.

This is dangerous, several people argued.  We don’t know if these objects have intentionality.  It turns out that the Discovery Institute co-opted part of this video to illustrate that God exists in the cell.

But, I argued against this.  The “intentionality” that people saw in this video, I think, was their own anthropomorphizing.  There was no intentionality inherent in the video — only motion.  Any intentionality is just a metaphor, just like the “selfish gene” is just a metaphor. It can help us to imagine these ideas by ascribing intentionality, perhaps, but we need to be very aware that it is just a metaphor.

So, I think that this video is great — it helps us imagine something we can’t usually see and relate to scientific content in a new way.  Phooey on the naysayers.  Does anyone agree with me?

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

I’m in a scientific visualization seminar now, so I’ll probably be sharing some beautiful things with some regularity.

There is something very satisfying about complex geometrical objects.  I think my brain feels this sigh of relief at such orderly intricacies.  So, I love these images created by computer algorithm, basically tweaking parameters to get surprising forms generated from simple polygons.  The details of how they do it was lost on me — lots of mathematical and computer jargon — but the output is beautiful.  From what I understand, they take a platonic solid and then use some process to systematically modify certain parameters, like curvature and branching.  Below is an example of the output.

Earlier this year NPR ran a narrated slideshow of the most spectacular images from the Hubble, with commentary from astronomers on why that particular image made them sit up and say wow.  Now, Hubble is back in action and just yesterday NASA released some new images.  They’re pretty, but astronomy has never been my forte, so I don’t have anything intelligent to say about them!

And on the social science side — here’s a site — Sociological Images — that’s not so much about how pretty things are, but how images affect us socially and psychologically, or what they mean about our culture.  Very interestingly written. A cool guest post today talks about the Don’t Mess with Texas littering campaign, and why it was successful where others failed.

For those who get off on graphs and data (I know you’re out there) — check out Chart Porn. Here’s one beautiful one that they reposted from Information is Beautiful which plots caffeine vs. calories of many of the things we toss into our bodies.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

Image from http://www.colorado.edu/MCEN/flowvis/

Our most famous fluids tend to be transparent — air and water, for example.  This makes it hard for us to imagine how fluids are moving as members of the general public, but also poses an interesting problem for budding engineers.  They need to know how to make fluids do what they want them to do.  So, Jean Herzberg in the Mechanical Engineering teaches a flow visualization course here at CU.  She does it in a fairly novel way, as a hands-on art and science course.

There’s a lot here.  Some of the things she covers are photographic techniques, flow visualization techniques, some of the physics and phenomenology of fluids such as fluid rotation.  She spends a lot of time on cloud physics.  “I’ll never be able to ignore the sky again,” says one participant.   But interestingly she also spends some time on the history of photography, which has evolved from a science to an art.

This is the only course in existence on flow visualization!  (and it shows up first in Google searches for “flow visualization”.) She gets some envy from colleagues when she presents her results at conferences, whose courses tend to be highly mathematical. It’s unusual to mix art and science in quite this way, in which art students are expected to document and experiment, whereas the engineering students are expected to create expressive images with impact.  The idea that engineers could learn something by creating something themselves is unheard of, and this enrages her.  And in the end, the engineers create images that are just as compelling and indistinguishable from those of the artists.

In the experiments that students develop at home, they use everyday household fluids, which are environmentally benign.  Usually toxic materials are used in laboratory courses, which is really unnecessary.  She finds that she can’t explain the unusual physics of some of their observations.  It’s also challenging because the exact properties of many of the materials used, such as food coloring and WD40.  Combustion and fluorescence, she says, are always popular (natch). For example, one group wanted to make green flame, so poured flaming methanol in boric acid.  Another made a negative image of smoke changing from laminar to turbulent flow as it exited the mouth.  The images she showed us were from her 2009 class which will be on the web shortly, but in the meantime you can see many amazing student images in their galleries.  The artistry of these images is astounding — the play of light and color, the use of humans as backdrops but using fluid flow as the main focus of the image.  The science of the images is also compelling.  One group of students discharged a fire extinguisher underwater, and saw three phases of matter (solid, liquid, gas) within that image.  A Tesla coil arcing through the air shows interesting patterns, showing discontinuities in the breakdown of air.

Students also take many images of clouds as part of their assignments, which are also on the gallery page.  Anyone who lives in Boulder knows that it’s an amazing spot for clouds — with the Rockies nearby and some interesting atmospheric conditions we get some curious clouds that I’ve never seen anywhere before.

What is the impact of this course on her students?  She finds, anecdotally, that students experience life-altering changes after the course, and her surveys show that students’ beliefs and attitudes change to be more enthusiastic about fluid flow and they notice fluid flow in everyday life.  (Why doesn’t she see this kind of change in her traditional engineering courses?)  She sees changes in students perceptions of the discipline and the physics.  Students feel better about the material — they see fluids as beautiful, interesting, useful, and fun.  Traditional fluid mechanics course students have negative responses on most of these — they see fluids as not beautiful, useful, and it’s not something they feel able to do.  This reminds me of my time at the Exploratorium, where I was first exposed to the incredible aesthetics of science, and the intersection between art and science.  I began to notice all sorts of little, beautiful things — the cracks in the sidewalk, light on a puddle, swirls of milk in my coffee.  I still do.  Life-altering experiences?  You betcha.

This is another kind of way of knowing fluid mechanics.  These students could probably point to the sky and explain things about fluid mechanics that those who learned to do the calculations can’t.  Note, however, that the engineering students in this flow visualization course have already taken the calculational fluid mechanics course.  I wonder, how would students in the traditional fluid mechanics course see that course differently if they took this visualization course first?

Note that this is not unrelated to my earlier post on Seeing the Unseen and Flow Visualization Video.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

This morning’s plenary was by KC Cole on her new book Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up
.

As anyone who knows one whit about me recognizes, this talk about Frank Oppenheimer and his creation of the Exploratorium was deeply significant to me.  I was a postdoc under Paul Doherty in the Teacher Institute for two years (and am tracing Frank back in time, as I’m now in the physics department at CU Boulder).  I never knew Frank Oppenheimer, but in a way I do, as the Exploratorium embodies his vision and spirit of play and exporation.  I was deeply affected by my time at the Exploratorium — it changed the way that I see the world and science.  My brain was buzzing for the two years I was at the museum, I felt constantly stimulated by the creativity and curiosity of the people around me.

I remember one day, it was a Monday, when the museum was closed.  Mondays were when the people in charge of exhibits could do stuff on the museum floor that are hard to do when there are 400 kids actively demonstrating Brownian motion.  We got an all-call email, “Come to the atrium to see something really cool.”  I’ll bite, so I wandered over to the museum, and saw a small crowd forming in front of something large.  It turned out to be an *immense* spherical mirror.  It was maybe 10 feet tall and 15 feet wide, and created a flawless real image… a ghostly “you” floating in air about 5 feet in front of the mirror.  It was a huge version of one of those “grab the coin” toys, where the coin appears to float above the surface.  We proceeded to play.  We’d walk towards the mirror, and the image would go through a transition, smearing out and flipping sickeningly upside-down, becoming a more familiar “virtual” image.  My favorite was when we realized that the mirror was reflecting sound waves in the same way as it did light waves. Standing on the left hand side of the mirror, I would see a perfect image of my colleague (who was standing on the right side), directly in front of me.  I whispered into the image of their ear.  An image of my *voice* was created next to their ear, and it sounded to them as if I was whispering directly into their ear, even though I was maybe 5 feet away.

Everyone has their stories like this from the Exploratorium, and KC Cole’s talk showed me how much this spirit of creative and social exploratory play emodies the spirit of the man behind the place.  Even though he died 20 years ago, he came up in conversation at the Exploratorium all the time.  People were always making sure that his philosophy still matched what they were doing.  An entire community of people inspired and dedicated to the vision of this man.  KC Cole had numerous stories of her time with him, when she was in her 20’s, and how he influenced her life.  After the talk, one man came up to tell her, “I was an Explainer at the Exploratorium.  That’s why I’m a physicist today.”  How charming.  I went up to my collleague Mike Dubson and said, “I want to go back to the Exploratorium!”  He told me that he feels a special connection to Frank, because he currently holds the “senior instructor” position that Frank vacated when he went to build the Exploratorium.

I miss the Exploratorium like a lover.  An appropriate metaphor, as one of the stories that KC told, if I’m remembering correctly, is that “Curiosity is like sex.  It has a practical purpose, but that’s almost never why anybody does it.”  I made the decision to leave San Francisco to come to Boulder, but if I’d wanted to stay in the Bay Area, I would have tried to stick to the Exploratorium like glue.  That postdoc was one of the happiest times of my life.  If only I could manage to work with them in some capacity, but the economy is so tough.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

A comment from a teacher about a nice lecture on how brass instruments work. I’ve seen Brian Holmes speak and he is very good!

French horn - Kstigharba on Wikipedia Commons

If you have a broadband connection you can hear and see a great lecture by Brian Holmes on how brass musical instruments work. It really is very good. I saw this presentation at the Northern California American Association of Physics Teachers convention a last year, although this presentation was given at Fermilab. The presentation should be at a level that everyone can enjoy. <http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/Colloquium/041006Holmes/vf001.htm>

Here, too, is a presentation by Brian Holmes on Science Friday. This episode also includes more on the physics of music.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

From AP via National Geographic - click for original

Well, I bet they’re all that cute.
But I don’t care how big and manly you are, you know you’re moved to scritch it behind the ears and say “who’s a cute little kitty? That’s right, you’re a cute little kitty. Waschawhaschawhuh.”

From the original article at National Geographic.

June 29, 2009—The discovery of ten lynx kittens—including the young cat in this May 2009 picture—this spring marks the first time newborn lynx have been documented in Colorado since 2006, heartening biologists overseeing restoration of the mountain feline (lynx facts, map, and more).

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

Wow, check out this beautiful video of visualizing fluid flow with a special tracer fluid (courtesy of Sebastien at the Exploratorium).  Stunning!

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.