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The Art of Physics: Bridging Science and Creativity with Dr. Ronald Gamble
16 Plays2 hours ago
This conversation explores the fascinating intersection of math, physics, and art, highlighting how these disciplines inform and inspire one another. Dr. Ronald Gamble discusses his journey as a theoretical physicist and artist, emphasizing the importance of recognizing patterns in nature and the role of creativity in scientific discovery. The dialogue delves into various topics, including the significance of symmetry in physics, the visualization of complex concepts like black holes and gravitational waves, and the influence of mathematical principles on artistic expression. Ultimately, the conversation underscores the idea that art and science are deeply interconnected, each enhancing the understanding and appreciation of the other.
Takeaways
- Inspiration is pattern recognition.
- Math serves as a language to describe physics.
- Art and physics both seek to decode patterns in the universe.
- Studying nature can enhance understanding of physics concepts.
- Creativity is essential in theoretical physics.
- Symmetry plays a crucial role in understanding the universe.
- Art can influence scientific thought and vice versa.
Chapters
- 00:00 The Intersection of Math, Physics, and Art
- 03:57 Finding Inspiration in Nature
- 06:16 The Art of Storytelling in Physics
- 08:31 Patterns in Nature and Art
- 10:13 The Influence of Physics on Art
- 12:23 Understanding Symmetry in Physics
- 16:46 Exploring Black Holes and Particle Physics
- 21:03 The Role of Tessellations in Physics
- 25:24 Celebrating Scientific Collaborations
- 27:24 The Art of Tessellation and Structure
- 29:06 The Power of Minimalism in Art and Science
- 31:05 Exploring Black Holes and Gravitational Waves
- 38:59 The Artistic Journey into Physics Course
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Transcript
The Nature of Inspiration
00:00:00
Speaker
Where does inspiration come from? It's a question artists and scientists have been quietly asking for centuries. Ask an artist and they'll talk about curiosity, observation, daily rhythms.
00:00:12
Speaker
And the details suddenly and feel bigger than they should. Now ask a mathematician or a physicist and they'll often say the same thing.
00:00:24
Speaker
At its core, inspiration is pattern recognition. It's noticing when the world reveals a structure that feels purposeful. Now that can look like a swirl of cream in your coffee that looks like a spiraling galaxy or cracks in the dry mud that echo stress patterns inside neutron stars. Both art and physics are attempts to decode those patterns.
00:00:48
Speaker
and to make sense of why the universe looks the way it does. So today we're going to follow those patterns, whether that's Renaissance sketches, black holes, and from sacred geometry to gravitational
Meet Dr. Ronald Gamble
00:01:02
Speaker
waves. I'm your host, Autumn Finaf, and I am joined by Dr. Ronald Gamble. an artist, co-host of the popular podcast, Science Will Win, a theoretical physicist at NASA, and a research scientist at the University of Maryland College Park. Ron, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming on the show. Now, I'm curious, where did your intersection of math and physics and art come into play? but Tell us a little about your experience and your journey with us. Basically, it was I was a child, right? So my mom, she painted, she drew. My dad also drew some. But she was also like a kind of like a sci-fi nerd as well. So I grew up watching Bob Ross in the morning, and then we watched Trek, Star wars First Contact, Trek. like all of that kind of like towards the evening yeah like all of the all of the super lore the cult classics for sci-fi that's what i grew up watching because i was watching it right next to her so i learned what the borg was from star trek alongside with her so it was pretty cool to see like just to see one of your parents kind of nerd out about it and then for you to be like okay so yeah that is that's cool too like that's i could do that
00:02:22
Speaker
But then also like, you know, kind of flexing the artistic side. It's okay. Well, I was always drawing on something, whether it was a wall, a sketch pad, the table, something, myself, I was always drawing
The Intersection of Art and Science
00:02:35
Speaker
on something. So, you know, kind of the, the combination of the two came in college where I double majored in fine arts and physics. So, which was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. So have a minor in fine arts, studio design. So that's basically like studying the modern art and post-impressionism era. So pretty much everything from Van Gogh, Degas, through Picasso, and Andy Warhol, and Basquiat, and Salvador Dali. So like I could probably write a thesis on modern art because I hyper fixated it. know and just the style but physics was kind of you know also like a dual first love so i was also questioning like what why does this happen why can't we actually we can see light in electromagnetism we can't see gravity right and what the heck's inside of a black hole what is dark matter why is there so much freaking dark energy We can't see it. So like all of those things, I was like wondering, it's the mysterious part of physics, right? So that's what kind of captured me. And I saw some evidence of things like geometry and things like that in art.
00:03:44
Speaker
Cubism is one of those, right? Tessellations are one of those. So there's a bunch of elements of art that combine geometry, which now you have a math as a bridge between the physics and the art.
00:03:55
Speaker
So that's kind of like the origin story, if you will. I think everybody has that real curiosity with an origin story. Speaking from experience, you you can't be a strategic thinker as a physicist or a mathematician without having some sort of creativity. It's how are you problem solving? And it's essentially bringing in that inspiration from one thing to the next. Yeah, yeah. With looking for inspiration, where do you find inspiration and how do you think about that? It's really nature. You got to sit.
00:04:27
Speaker
If you're going to study nature, you got to sit in it. So I used to study outside, doing physics literally on the grass outside. And you're doing your mechanics, homework, whatever, but you're watching it in action, like a bird going through the air or dive bombing. You could even study gravity by a squirrel falling out of a tree and hitting the ground. Sorry, Mr. Squirrel, but...
00:04:47
Speaker
Thank you for teaching me Newton's mechanics. But it's things like that. It's like, okay, well, why did the squirrel fall faster than the leaf? you know So now you're studying air resistance. Now you're getting you know drag. Now you're learning friction. So it's all those things. You combine those together. It's like, yeah, you're going to learn physics really fast, but it's in in a very intuitive way. And so you take that. There is a lot of things you know that you can borrow from other areas of science and apply that back to physics. Yeah. but you're using art as a language to then describe such things. Or you're using math as a language to describe it, right? So I like to tell people that math is kind of like a language to physics. If you know the math, you can talk physics. But just because you can speak the language doesn't mean you comprehend what you're saying.
00:05:33
Speaker
You got to know the science also. So if you combine all of that together, then yeah, you're going to, you can solve a lot of problems in physics. And theoretical physics requires that creative brain.
00:05:44
Speaker
Because we have to constantly think outside the box and create new things. Test it. It's probably going to break eight times out of 10. But it's those last two times. Oh, this worked. But the minus sign was wrong. Okay, do it again. It's always that one sign. It's always the minus Caught by reviewer, too.
00:06:02
Speaker
it's It's, yeah. So it's it's it's it's very intuitive. it is it It's a very cognitive kind of
Storytelling and Scientific Theory
00:06:10
Speaker
subfield, right? You have to very, you've got to learn how your brain works to do well in theoretical physics. So this makes me question, does that bridge make us good storytellers? I would say it could, provided, now caveat, not every theorist is a great communicator.
00:06:29
Speaker
We know this. yeah We know this. But where your brain lives and where it belongs between the art and that intersection and beauty of the theory, where is that all intersecting? It makes for great storytelling. Yeah. Like you said. So you you have to be able to, if i'm if I'm developing a theory, so let's take Einstein for an example.
00:06:51
Speaker
Sure. He was developing relativity. This is 1905. He's on his bicycle riding in a circle. That's what he did. These were thought experiments, right? um And so he would just think, no math, no papers, just think about the problem.
00:07:04
Speaker
Okay, how can I actually describe what I'm thinking? How do I describe this in such a way that's going to make sense on paper first? um And so it's like it's a technique that we use in theoretical physics or in some other sciences. You just run a thought experiment.
00:07:19
Speaker
Can I actually think this through? If I can't think it through elegantly, right, then I can't write it down elegantly. And that's something that Stephen Hawking kind of relied on too. So, um and you can name a bunch of other theorists out there. Reva K. Williams did that. Paul Dirac was another one, but that's, I'm balancing between the decades, but there's a lot of theorists that I studied in their work. That they also thought, okay, if I can do this elegantly, if I can write this down elegantly and describe it, it's going to be a great theory. And so i think that's where the center of it all fits. The art, the physics, the cognitive part of it. It's all got to be rooted in, can you tell a great story with facts? If you can do that, then you have a great theory.
00:08:03
Speaker
All you need to do is have a bunch of money to prove it correct. Hey, that that is the big thing. It is whether or not you have funding. It's a big question. But, you know, again, that's one of the other things that I love about theory.
00:08:16
Speaker
You don't really need and you don't need money to do pen and paper theory. You just need creativity and the skill set. And that's it. When you're thinking about history, you see folks like lee Leonardo da Vinci, you see Escher, Islamic geometry. How do you see physics hiding in plain sight? You mentioned nature, but where else? So the key word is patterns. If you can recognize the pattern, then you can recognize the geometry of the art in nature, right? example is the honeycomb for honeybees, right? So their nests, they have a particular structure for the honeycomb. But we also see honeycomb lattices in other places in nature.
00:08:54
Speaker
The carbon molecule, carbon groups, do you take six carbons together, it's going to make a honeycomb. It's going to be a hexagon, so not a pentagon, people, But it's very close, right? In terms of patterns, they do the same thing. Other areas of physics, we're talking keywords now. where Now we're deep diving into things like topological insulators. We're talking superconductivity. We're talking the quantum nature of physics.
00:09:19
Speaker
and technologies today, right? So those are patterns. If we can figure out the pattern, then we can figure out the physics. But even before that, the inspiration comes from finding these things in nature. How is a snowflake? If you look at a snowflake under a microscope, you'll see the pattern.
00:09:34
Speaker
It's not just a little dusty ball falling out of the sky. It's a crystal. So it's it's things like that. And we know for a fact that particular molecules have very specific shapes down to like the single degree. And if you change that so very slightly, it'll change the way the molecule works. So even those things, it is, nature is very intentional.
00:09:56
Speaker
So there, there is a, however you want to describe a a master creator, You know, somebody was sketching this out and say, yeah, this is all going to work. And I'm going to click go on this nature machine. Yeah. With that, do you think artists sometimes will recognize the mathematics before
Artistic Influence of Scientific Concepts
00:10:12
Speaker
the sun? Sometimes they do. So, for example, Salvador Dali studied quantum mechanics before he painted ah the persistence of time painting.
00:10:22
Speaker
So the persistence of time by Salvador Dali is what Dali thought quantum mechanics or quantum physics would be visualized as. So the melting clock, all of these kind of abstract serialism things, he borrowed from quantum mechanics and how it made him think, reshaped some of the patterns, reshaped concept, composition in the art. And so you can kind of see that, right? Cubism is another form of art that's kind of influenced by mathematics and geometry. There's a lot of, you can pluck out the golden ratio in most cubism paintings because they're using they're using it to figure out the proportions of things. So cubism isn't exactly just random shapes in there. It is it is a very hard area of of art to kind of paint in. It's a very hard style, but
00:11:12
Speaker
If you can get the shapes right, right, the geometry, again, was kind of influencing that. And there's many other areas of modern art, even contemporary art, that borrows from math or science. Math or science first will then influence the art that's created next. So it's kind of that pattern back and forth.
00:11:29
Speaker
And even some artists influenced the scientists. So there's another side to it, right? so Precisely. Studying art will get you better science. Now, will studying physics change the way you look at art from the past?
00:11:44
Speaker
Because i'm I'm thinking about M.C. Escher and Jackson Pollock with some of their works, right? Jackson Pollock took paintings in a pendulum when he had a brushstroke with his arm.
00:11:57
Speaker
And the patterns were repetitive so you could actually see that. Yeah. So, ah so again, this is a, an analogy is to Jackson Pollock. It's like looking at phases of matter.
00:12:09
Speaker
You have solid is it's pretty structured, you know, a liquid is a little bit more fluid. A gas might look all random, right? But if you actually pay attention to the pattern, it's it's got something in there. it's Something's repeating. So just like the Jackson Pollock, which I also studied, understudied, Jackson Pollock had a method kind of to his madness, I would say. It's not all just throwing hate on the canvas. There was a method, a very structured method to creating that. It may look like chaos, but again, like a gas, an inert gas. It may look chaotic, but But there's a pattern to it.
00:12:44
Speaker
So and there's an area of mathematics called chaos theory that actually looks at this in very detailed fashion. And some of that chaos theory and randomness in his work can actually now be calculated to see and yeah and verify if it was him. Now, thinking about this a little bit more with structure, could you explain to us how physicists think of symmetry? Yep, I know. It's the loaded question.
00:13:13
Speaker
Like I knew it was coming. So symmetry, one, symmetry is basically you finding universal patterns, right? Just to lay down the definition of symmetry, that's what you're looking for.
00:13:25
Speaker
We're talking about symmetry in physics. On a deeper level, we are we are trying to get to like the real essence of why certain things work the way they do and why they don't. Why there's An asymmetry to matter, antimatter in the universe. And why we really don't want that to be equal. Otherwise, we go kapoof, right? So we're actually grateful that there's more matter than antimatter.
00:13:47
Speaker
Otherwise, you don't want the antimatter version of Ron. I don't think you don't you want the supersymmetric version of Ron. But that is, Which version of the supersymmetric version of Ron? And see, this is... Hey.
00:14:01
Speaker
Do not get me started on the multiverse of physics. But symmetry, again, is a it can be used as a technique in physics to discovering new things. And so one of them being, you know, discovering the fact that we have antimatter going in opposite directions in terms of scattering, spin, things like that. if you go back to the 1960s or 50s, right, you're going back to the Wu experiment, right? So there was experimental physicist, last name Wu, her last name was Wu, and she did experiments using the decay of cobalt-60. So the cobalt-60 nucleus sent back particles instead of it sending it forward.
00:14:39
Speaker
And that is how we kind of had a first introduction to the weak nuclear force. So to discover, oh, there's other particles that are coming out of this thing other than electrons, neutrons, photons, neutrons, We knew all those things. I'm like, cool.
00:14:54
Speaker
But a few bosons? Like, what the heck is that? So all of these experiments, based on symmetry now, it it is something that that can discover new things, right? And so all in all in physics, we have a symmetry of charge parity, which is handedness, left or right, right? That's your plus and minus sign, essentially.
00:15:13
Speaker
There's a time symmetry. There's translational symmetry. And so we're thinking now thinking about, okay, Do I have things that move forward in time or backward, right? Do I have things that can only veer left or right?
00:15:26
Speaker
Are they only negative charge? Are they very but there are some that are positive charge, right? So those are those are the fundamental laws of nature that we are figuring out. That's symmetry at its most fundamental level in physics. You can apply symmetry at home.
00:15:40
Speaker
If you put in your AA battery wrong, then your remote's not going to turn on. That is symmetry. You need the charge to go in a specific direction. That's symmetry for it to work. Another prime example is if you take, cover your face with a sheet of paper, take a picture in the mirror and then do the opposite, do the same thing and then take each side and Photoshop them together, they will
Exploring Black Holes
00:16:04
Speaker
mismatch.
00:16:05
Speaker
Because the human face is not perfectly symmetric down the middle. And if it were, we would probably we would look weird. That's why I said, which symmetric version of Ron do you so there's So in essence, there's kind of there's this beauty in symmetry that I really like in my work. Because my work involves not three dimensions of physics, but four or more. So we really heavily rely on...
00:16:29
Speaker
symmetry whether or not space is flowing in one direction or time in the other um that is symmetry in action when you're studying black holes you really need to learn symmetry to make sure that there's no rogue minus sign going somewhere because otherwise you'll we'll turn a black hole into a white hole and that's no good okay can you can you tell us like a little bit about your work Yeah. so Because I'm curious. I threw you right in.
00:16:56
Speaker
You got to show the dates, man. So so my work is, i I study black holes, but i'm I am mostly interested in the effects of strong gravity and particle physics in high energy emission around a black hole.
00:17:10
Speaker
So we're talking near the event horizon, things like that, where the black hole itself that is normally considered, and if it's inside starfish, A galaxy, it's called an Aegean, an active galactic nucleot. It's kind of the environment of ah the supermassive black hole at the center. So those are the objects that I study.
00:17:26
Speaker
But I also study the jets that come off of them. So you can think of a jet, relativistic jet, coming off of a supermassive black hole as kind of like a black hole lighthouse. It's a stream of particles. They get accelerated from...
00:17:38
Speaker
maybe 10% to 20% speed of light, all the way up to 99.99999% the speed of light. And all of those nines matter. So we're getting closer and closer. We can't exactly get to...
00:17:52
Speaker
100% speed of light, right? Because now we're breaking symmetries here. We're breaking some laws. But we can get, they accelerate very, extremely fast. Extremely fast. We're trying to figure out why. Why are these jets created? Why are they why are they in the shapes that they are over very long distances? little parsecs in length. So that's on the order of 3,000 light years across. oh These are very, very large objects. And they're very bright. They're very energetic. but They're very hot. And they come off. very, very near the surface of a black hole, the event horizon, right?
00:18:25
Speaker
That area we call a photon sphere. We can maybe do another episode on black hole anatomy, but... We're going to have to. We're going to have to. That is my work. And I look at the theory of synchrotron emission from these environments and the X-ray emission and some of the gamma rays. So I'm looking at the non-thermal emission. How was this influenced by gravity? All of my, which you can actually see behind me, that's some of my work. It just got published like a month ago. So it's, I am a pen and paper theorist.
00:18:57
Speaker
Whenever I see your blackboard behind you, I'm going, what is he working on Right. There's too many variables. It's a lot. But I mean, if you were to peg it down to like one area of of physics, for those that are listening, if you want to study this, this is general relativity mixed with radiative transfer. So vector radiative transfer. So we're talking the transfer of radiation in curved spacetime in four dimensions not three lots of math just to describe just to tell the story yeah so it's cool it's fun to me um you know and i do computational work too trying to learn more observational techniques but it is yeah it's a lot of coding with time it does
00:19:43
Speaker
Basically, if you were to take an elective, try to piece the different subfields of physics together, that's what that's what you're studying. um And I use a lot of Mathematica. I'm like, thank you, Stephen Wolfram, for inventing Mathematica. And Fortran. Okay. You're a Fortran guy. I am a Fortran guy. Have been since undergrad. I've been've been using Fortran a lot. My advisor forced me to learn it.
00:20:10
Speaker
Okay. thanks Thanks. So he was like, if you're going to do real physics, you're going to learn Fortran. I'm like, you might be unhinged, but okay. I think you might you might be going somewhere here. Not many people do, but have you also used cobalt? Yes. I looked at some very old cobalt code. I do not use it regularly.
00:20:32
Speaker
It's like no one uses cobalt anymore. Only government agencies. Only government. It's only archaic codes that they can't get rid of Some satellites are using cobalt code.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah. We have some very old satellites that are still using cobalt. Only because it's just the root code and you can't get rid of them. You can't get rid of the machine. You can't get rid of the server it's running on. It's, yeah. So. So if anyone wants to learn physics, learn Fortran and Cobalt. See, a Python's cool too. It's, you know. Yeah. yeah You learn them.
00:21:04
Speaker
They're applicable for things that are up to date. Right. Now, thinking about this in a different sense. Do you ever think about tessellations when you're going into your work?
00:21:17
Speaker
Because some some stuff is a pattern within itself. And does that play into anything that you do for work? It does in some sense. So there there are...
00:21:30
Speaker
I would say there are certain techniques that we use to kind of make the math more computable on a computer. Obviously, we have to avoid one over zero. Can't calculate infinity still. But the other thing that we do is we kind of break down. this is a technique that we do use in numerical relativity. We break down our space-time or we call it, decademy.
00:21:50
Speaker
Really, it's called foliation. Basically, we separate the space and the time from each other. Okay. But in such a way that the physics is still doing the same, right? We call it a three plus one split or foliation, where we're basically just separating the spatial components from your function or vector, or tensor, what have you, your field. from the time component and you're turning the crank on the map to compute everything numerically. In doing that, you have to develop a computational grid. All of you computational physicists out there, you know exactly what I'm talking about and the headache it is to get your grid and your resolution of the grid exactly the way you want it so that you can calculate things so that the end result, the data is smooth, right? You don't want any hiccups or anything like that. We know exactly, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Smooth data is great data.
00:22:39
Speaker
So that that is one area that we kind of use. We're very closely matched to like tessellations. And tessellations just repeated patterns, right, over a large scale. Another area of physics where you'll see that is things that are more statistical in nature.
00:22:53
Speaker
So if you've ever won run a Monte Carlo simulation, you are using tessellations. My God. I do not envy people who have to do that. I have my love-hate relationship with the MCMC, but, and that's Markov chain Marni Carlo, just so so we're clear.
00:23:11
Speaker
You beat me to saying that. Okay. As an industrial engineer who started her research in soft condensed matter physics. Boy. Yeah.
00:23:22
Speaker
yeah i I have some strong feelings about MCMC. Very strong. Yeah. But it's very powerful, too. it's It's a powerful tool. it It borrows, well, the icing model for our condensed matter people, our material science people who do that, also borrows from, this is your nearest neighbor approximation. So, again, this is, i mean, they use these techniques. It's not just exclusive to physics. It's used in economics very heavily.
00:23:52
Speaker
The other thing that I think of was one of the things that I worked on is folding and packing.
Design in Engineering
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah. And you're looking at various lattice shapes and um think of it as origami, even including the satellites and some of the space stations. Yeah. whether that's going into like radial symmetry, whether that's a muria map folds. And you're also taking the packing and changing not just the structure, but also the materials. Yeah, yeah. That you're using. So to break it down for people in normal terms, if you can fold a map, you can fold a satellite. And some of this is with a hinge. Other times it's squishy contact lens material. Mm-hmm. And your properties and bending and folding are different. And it just changes that.
00:24:46
Speaker
it its Yeah, it's and it's very it might seem like a simple problem, but one one thing that and people saw this live. It was James Webb Space Telescope. Yes. Unfolding the universe. That's where it came from.
00:25:00
Speaker
The telescope had to literally be folded up, shipped out right from launched from the French Guyana and they had to unfold it in orbit in space and then push it out.
00:25:12
Speaker
right to its Lagrange point where it's at now, just doing phenomenal work. But the engineers that designed it were just out of this world. They ja took a grand problem. Shout out to all of them. It's, yeah, it's it's awesome. One of my good friends, Jane Rigby, she's phenomenal. Like it was, there were there and there were just so many, there were just so many science and technology champions on that team that got it up. it's It was amazing. So shout out to all of them. Hi, Jane, if you're watching this. Have you ever thought about underlying lattice structures, whether that's in your paintings, whether that's in some jets, whether that's in some cosmic events? I know you do yeah a wide array of art and it's super cool. Yeah, it's it's it is a tessellation actually is a.
00:26:00
Speaker
It's a technique in the art world. it's It's a way that you can ensure that a pattern is created the same way every time. Stenciling is essentially a kind of hard and fast version of tessellation. That's kind of where it started. Stenciling.
00:26:16
Speaker
And they used print work. So back in the cities when they kind of revolutionized print work, this is how they did it. They made one stencil. You put it up on a canvas or your artwork and then you repeated it. you just keep repeating the pattern so keith herring was an artist that i can think of whenever you see ah a keith herring painting or design that's a tessellation Okay. And so, yeah. And it's that's another, it's kind of a, his his work is becoming very prominent now in the contemporary world. Andy Warhol was another pop artist that did tessellations or print work. So it's these print work is now, it's coming up, right?
00:26:51
Speaker
You can have a screen printer or on a t-shirt that will utilize tessellations. So in my work, I look at and I borrow things from lattice structures. I borrow things from, okay, well, how If I'm making a wave, can I can i put nodes in this wave of design and make it kind of structured more like a graph, right? so now we're getting borrowing things from like graph theory, group theory, you know, and things like that. Lattice theory.
00:27:17
Speaker
i mean, you name it, there is a artistic rendition of it when considering tessellations and things like that. Now, is there any point that you've ever come across where too much structure has ever become limiting? Yeah. And this is why minimalistic art is so dynamic. Because you can, you can, and this is what we, in the art world, all of our artists will know, you can overwork a painting. You can overwork a composition.
00:27:44
Speaker
we're just You're just trying to squish in too much into the composition. If you take a lot out, sometimes it makes a much better painting or design. And so in the engineering and science world, we call that optimization.
00:27:56
Speaker
In the art world, we just call it minimalistic. So it is that something and minimalism is a big area of art. Can't think of any minimalistic arts off the top of my head. But there is another area that's more minimalistic and geometric in nature. We call that neoplasticism.
00:28:14
Speaker
So it was a movement in art. Another one that came right before that was the Bauhaus movement that came out of Germany. And we know Bauhaus because we know the art and we know the furniture. Yes. That borrows from that minimalistic mid-century modern design. So now we're thinking Frank Lloyd Wright and the way he designed the mid-century modern home and furniture and things like that. So you can you can look at these things and And they are very minimalistic in nature, but they are very structured. And the design is sound. The design is strong. ah So you don't need a lot to have a great design. The same thing with physics. You don't need a lot. You don't have to cram a bunch of things in there to make an elegant theory, to make a beautiful theory.
00:28:55
Speaker
You actually need it to be simple. if you can If you can describe it simply, then you know it well. So that's the power kind of in minimalism for physics and some art. Minimalism, not just only in physics, art, yeah storytelling, um a lot of attorneys the less that you say it's and you had to get i mean so i think it's safe to say like i grew up in the early times of twitter we only had like 140 characters so you had to get create we didn't have 250 like what is that well yeah we don't have unlimited characters to unlock a novel but we had even less social media was archaic
00:29:37
Speaker
We had a finite amount of characters that you had describe your little thing in, your picture, video, whatever. and We weren't really monetizing it like crazy like we are today. But we didn't have threads. We had to really make a concise statement on what we were trying to say. And I think it taught us how to talk, right? So it kind of taught us minimalistically, if you're not abbreviating a bunch of things, It kind of teaches you how to talk very concisely if you're using it for that. There are other things that we use for social media that's not conducive to any of our work. We don't need brain rotting.
00:30:13
Speaker
We don't. We don't need I think that there's been a fine line in that technology. Are we the last generation? I'm going to date date some of us here.
00:30:24
Speaker
Actually, the both of us here. Are we like the end of that generation that knows how to use a rotary phone? Oh, my. I think we are. But it's yeah, we grew up with the brick. The cell phone was like this big. And half of that was the battery, not even the actual phone. And now we have iPhones that are just ridiculous. it's Yeah. So we've seen it all.
00:30:47
Speaker
We got our cute pink Razor phone that I still have. Do not get me started on dial-up internet. For the love God, I was so glad. so glad we don't use dial-up anymore. They just got rid of the last AOL dial-up.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yep. That's a classic sound. It's amazing. When you're building out models, whether it's black holes or gravitational waves, do those things feel artistic at all?
Artistic Visualization in Physics
00:31:15
Speaker
In in a sense, yeah.
00:31:16
Speaker
Because you you can't just you can't just kind of design a model, compute results, and put up a white and black graph. You know, with a bunch of lines saying, yeah, this is a black hole.
00:31:28
Speaker
Okay, it might be. But my equations were actually computed in three and four dimensions, not a 2D graph. So a 2D graph doesn't really give me, okay, well, where are these photons going? Right. I see the peaks, but where, how are they traveling around a black hole or something like that? How are they, how was the magnetic field manipulating this trajectory? What's the shape of that?
00:31:51
Speaker
So when you're studying these objects, jets and black holes, even accretion disks that are around a black hole, you are really talking about geometry. Geometry plays a large influence on some of these mechanisms. Right.
00:32:04
Speaker
And so we're going back to how do I display these results after I compute something, that is in the realm of scientific visualization. And that's a big, that's a big, that's a big deal. NASA has a scientific visualization studio. It's called NASA SVS. Bunch of great and free graphics that you can download and use. Give them credit. They're awesome. But um as far as, you know, how do I display a jet? How do I describe a black hole visually? You need color.
00:32:31
Speaker
You need, the the proper geometry black holes are not perfect spheres they're oblate spheroids squished because they spin around if i was to calculate the the volume of a jet is it a cylinder or is it a cone um A lot of the times when you see high energy astrophysics data, right, you're not looking at a like a Hubble type picture. You know, Hubble's in the UV and the visual or the visible spectrum. We're not looking at radio, X-ray, gamma, right? So those things are kind of, they're invisible to the human eye, but we use what's called false color images to kind of ok colorize.
00:33:10
Speaker
some of these objects viewed in these particular bands. So generally you you might use blues and purples for x-rays, so greens, you know, for gamma radiation, and then maybe red or something yellow for radio data. And if I put them all over top of each other, then I'll see a rainbow of things.
00:33:32
Speaker
I'll see a rainbow of data and I can then pluck out. That's where a high cluster of the x-ray knot was. I had an x-ray flare there because I know I colored my data purple for x-ray. So I can then go back after I've created this image and then reanalyze the image to see, all right, now that I've colored everything, where does it all, how does it all relate? So that goes into the visualization process. It goes into analyzing the data.
00:33:57
Speaker
that you either observe or compute. But then also it goes into, again, telling the story of your science. If you have very good visualization that's based on data, you can tell a great story.
00:34:07
Speaker
And that now removes a lot of the backlog or the backstory, right? The filler, the jargon that you have to explain to say, well, a black hole is not a sphere. Well, i can just show it to you instead of just tell you.
00:34:20
Speaker
I can let you figure that out now. And now you're discovering for yourself that a black hole is an oblate spheroid and not just a sphere because you can see it, right? It's those things. And it it makes for a very good teaching mechanism also, especially when you're talking to the general public.
00:34:38
Speaker
That is super neat. So just thinking about that, would that even, if I was breaking it down, would even some of that look like level curves on a graph? Yeah.
00:34:48
Speaker
If you were doing it topologically and I was cutting something on a map down, that that was the first thing that just came to my mind. Yeah. And you've, you've have probably the everyday person has probably seen it. If you've looked at your GPS, Apple maps, it's a level set, right? Okay. So there it's calculating some height, some distance, and it's given you a map. Cartography originated that, right? Right.
00:35:13
Speaker
So if you're looking at the surface of the ocean waves and things like that, that's how they map it. That's how we map surfaces of planets, the moon. um I mean, you name the area. There is some type of surface visualization associated with it. And mathematically, we'll call that a level set.
00:35:29
Speaker
We'll have another, have some constant value at each surface. Right. So visualizing ocean depth is another example of level sets. And so it's it's it is a classic and widely used technique when you're visualizing scientific data. Now, let's shift this a little bit more to gravitational waves. Mm hmm. When you're thinking about this, just waves in general, we're thinking about them visually, geometrically. Some people might think of that as like musically.
00:35:59
Speaker
Yeah. If that gives you something for a perspective for a mental visualization. How did those things really appear for you, whether it's in art or in your mind? And when explaining them to people who've never seen a diagram before, what metaphors would be? Sound.
00:36:17
Speaker
So it is it is literally the way sound waves are created in air, the way we're talking through the microphone and, you know, it's vibrating some you know, node inside the microphone is a magnet. It's propagating the sound, turning into electrical signal. That is the same way that we study gravitational waves. We look at the literal vibration of space-time and its effect on something like a laser. So they use laser inter interferometry to detect the passing of a gravitational wave, and it's on the order of like...
00:36:52
Speaker
And it's like 10 to the minus 15, much actually much smaller than that. A gravitational wave of amplitude is on the order of like 10 to the minus 21, 23. these are extremely small vibrations that we're detecting. But if we can detect the data, right?
00:37:11
Speaker
then I can transform that or I can sonify that, right? Sonification is transforming the data into sound. Then I can actually create an orchestra of gravitational waves, right? And so we've done that before. And when LIGO first came out with its observations in 2015, I was in grad school and I freaked out. I'm like, yo.
00:37:33
Speaker
this is it was like i'm not gonna say it was a tinfoil hat moment but it was like oh the universe is actually talking to us it's like great we don't have anything to listen to it but we have ligo it's like okay but we just have one detection it's like what are we gonna do with it i don't know we're gonna do it again We're going to do it again to to make sure that there is some sort of art or a essential tool to make people feel space time. So it's it is it is a very kind of it's it's very intentional in terms of matching it back to sound. and which is another one of your senses, right? So not just the visual art, but now you can kind of hear the data.
00:38:12
Speaker
You can look up a chirp mass sound on Google. Okay. And you'll hear the gravitational wave go by and it'll sound like a little whip. It'll just literally sound like whoop. That's the chirp mass. So that little spike at the very end is the two black holes spinning around each other, combining together until they... begin to overlap. And that's the chirp mass. So that's that's a little blip in there.
00:38:37
Speaker
It's a very fast signal. So it's only on the order of like maybe a few seconds. But the the universe is talking to us. That is super Gravitational waves. Yeah, it's really cool. So you told me before this interview that you're launching a new course.
Bridging Art and Physics in Education
00:38:54
Speaker
Tell us about it. And what are you hoping people walk away from it? and if you've If you've already signed up, I'm behind. So more delays coming, but don't tell anybody. Don't tell.
00:39:07
Speaker
But the source, the the the the course, it's called The Artistic Journey into Physics. And it is combining science and art together. But it's I'm doing it in such a way that it's not disconnected. a lot of the times, whenever, and I've seen this done before, nothing against them, but I had issues. And I thought, well, you could have introduced this and combined it this way.
00:39:29
Speaker
And so the course is set up into three different tracks with each track increasing in kind of mathematical or physics difficulty. And so the course, by its fundamentally, it's it's combining concepts from modern art in our traditional elements of design now. So you arts majors, you'll see the elements of design in there, air shape, space, frequency, there's momentum, there's color theory in there, things like that.
00:39:56
Speaker
And so one of the examples is, okay, well, you can relate color theory. Red and green are complementary colors, blue and orange, purple and yellow. You know, if I combine red and green together, I get brown. You know, blue and yellow make green and things like that. So that can be related back to light in the electromagnetic spectrum.
00:40:14
Speaker
visible light optics things like that they really rely on some of the same concepts that we use in color theory so combining those two together now brings a more intuitive kind of thought process into how physics and art or nature in physics nature and art combined together and this is really where Like where I'm really revealing some of like the secrets and how some of these people thought because this is this is what's going through our brains for the the theorists, right?
00:40:45
Speaker
In physics who are also artists. um Einstein played the violin. Feynman played the saxophone. i paint. I also played the clarinet for a number of years, actually, since I was eight. Clarinet and piano.
00:40:57
Speaker
So it is it's it's. this you'll You'll be surprised at how many hardcore scientists are also artists at the same time. We're using the same parts of our brain. So that is where the the course kind of kind of borrows from. and these three tracks, I will say, track one is an atomic apprentice where you're basically, it's a basic concepts in physics. This is the explain it to me like I'm five track.
00:41:21
Speaker
And I literally put in there. This one, if that's what you're looking for, this is for you. This is for you.
00:41:30
Speaker
So very little math. It's more conceptual, more fun, very visual. I'm going to be introducing some kind of hands-on things that you can do. Some, maybe a scavenger hunt or two in there. ah so you can also find, okay, well, what is he talking about? Patterns in nature. I don't see these. Well, look at a seashell and then come back to me.
00:41:48
Speaker
You'll see the patterns. Look at a snail. sunflower. sunflower. Fern. You'll see fractals everywhere. Yeah. So you'll you'll see it. Track two is more...
00:41:59
Speaker
More math, a little bit, ah going kind of deeper into the concept of the physical laws of nature. And that's the cosmic artist. You can kind of see the pattern here. You're an atomic apprentice. You're a cosmic artist.
00:42:12
Speaker
And so if you are, you know, a STEM creator on social media, if you're an influencer or you're a motivated middle school high school student,
00:42:24
Speaker
Track two is for you, right? So, and I list kind of prerequisites. The first one, you just need a desire to learn. The second one, you you're going to need some algebra, some trigonometry, little bit of motivation can kind of get through it.
00:42:37
Speaker
The third track is going to be introduced. I'm going to really reserve that to like a private cohort. um of students or people interested. And that's the relativistic surrealist. So that is going to be hard core physics. This is now. Is there a level that people should think about. You definitely have to know. Definitely not to go calculus. Frontier equations. This is for the the the physics majors. This is for the math majors. Grad and grad. Engineers. Engineers. If you're a STEM major and you've already had calculus, yeah, you'll be able to figure this out. ah But it's also for your advanced enthusiast also. So if you're well read and you can handle it, you can apply to be in that cohort and I'll review whether or not, you know,
00:43:28
Speaker
if You'll be ready for the hardcore theoretical physics. The professor is in. Some say they're ready. He's like, okay, here. Now, here's a field equation. Can you find me the eigenvalues so I can actually pluck out the the ah nominal modes for the field? It's like, what is that? You're not ready. That's that's the level it's going to be at.
00:43:52
Speaker
grad students ask me that question, okay? So... it's It's going to be... i mean, yeah, at a ba at a bare minimum, you need... To at least have physics one and two, modern physics, some vector calculus. Linear algebra. Linear algebra would be nice. You know, some coding. Portrait ANC, something like that. Mathematica is awesome. Python. Python. you could still do Python. You've got a bias to Python? I see that facial expression. Because some people, they swear by using...
00:44:23
Speaker
They swear by using Python for parallel computing. No. And I'm like, yeah, that's that's only so that we can organize the script, not to actually do the computations on the arrays. You need C or Fortran to do that.
00:44:37
Speaker
A compiled language, not a scripted one. We got to get out of the notion that Python's a silver bullet for everything. i agree. It's a great scripting language and it does a lot of cool things. hard If you want to compute math, math you're going to need Fortran or C to do that. and a lot i mean, you can even do it in Mathematica, but you're going to be banging your head against the wall. You got it. There's a learning curve for Mathematica, but once you get it, it's it's pretty tough.
00:45:03
Speaker
It is. Pathmatic is awesome. But ye the track three is really for really teaching you hardcore how to think like a theoretical physicist now. How do I...
00:45:15
Speaker
where Where did Einstein's equations come from? We're going to at least touch on a very abstract view of that. how do I get Einstein's field equation? Where does that come from? How do I prove that? How do I derive it? And things like that. The Feynman lectures probably touch on those. And so it's going to be a, it's not an extensive course, because again, my time is everywhere. My calendar is ridiculous. You're doing everything but the kitchen sink. Listen, so it it's it's, I was thinking of putting all of the lectures or whatever out there at one time, but I've moved to, okay, I'm going to do this, like, I'm going to push out one every two weeks or three weeks or so stretch it out a little bit.
00:45:54
Speaker
It gives you more time to consume the material um and to really kind of follow along and anticipate and, okay, well, what's coming up next? Yep. Yeah. So it's going to be really cool.
00:46:06
Speaker
Yeah. um So you can sign up now. You can go journeyintophysics.com and sign up to be on the wait list. It's awesome. I'm excited for it.
00:46:17
Speaker
It's going to be cool. Wonderful. i have one last question for you. Do you think art makes you a better physicist or being a physicist makes you a better artist? Ooh, that's a good question. i think I think art makes you a better physicist because there's there's no real, well, there is some real, um I would say hard and fast rules to art, but you are the essence of art. You're learning, you're teaching your brain how to create.
00:46:44
Speaker
That's the essence of art. But you're not only teaching it how to create, you're teaching it how to re-describe what you've already seen or imagined. So there is a large creative imagination process. You have to learn how to do, you got to train your brain how to do an art.
00:46:58
Speaker
Physics, you don't have to do that. But if you can do that, that's a game changer. Because now... You're not just imagining things, but you're imagining a solution to a problem.
00:47:09
Speaker
You're a problem solver now. And we've known, um you know, we we all know, if you can create and get creative in solving problems, then you're doing a great job in figuring some things out.
00:47:22
Speaker
Out of the box. Forget the box. Forget the box box. Just draw a circle, a triangle, whatever it is. Maybe the the solution requires you to color everything outside the box, but nothing inside the box.
00:47:35
Speaker
What was the saying? Someone said, well, I don't have a box. I don't have a chair. I found a piece of paper and folded it myself. Right. Like, so look, there's another piece of paper. I'm just going to go and fold it. And someone's like, what? I'm like, yeah, it only took me 3000 pieces.
00:47:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's it. Yeah. That's all. That's all. But it's structurally stable and holds my weight. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But on that note, thank you so much for coming on the show, Ron.
00:48:06
Speaker
This was great. ah Thanks for having me. This was awesome. This was awesome. time That's all for today's episode of Breaking Math. If you've enjoyed this conversation, share it with someone who loves science, art, or asking big questions that don't fit neatly into one box. You can find the links to our show and to Ron's work. his course, and everything else we've discussed in the show notes. As always, thank you for listening, being curious, and for noticing the patterns in the world around us. Until next time, stay curious and stay informed.