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Galileo should be canonised
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Watch and be watched
Peter Mallet
A playful interactive exhibition is loaded with sinister undertones
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Recorders Manchester Art Gallery, UK, until 30 January 2011 Reviewed by Kat Austen
RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER’S art takes a piece of you, traps it and exposes it to the world. Recorders, the Mexican-born artist’s new exhibition, uses interactive media to explore our fascination with watching ourselves. It also explores the disquieting feeling of being watched. In Pulse Index, participants volunteer to have their fingerprint and pulse rate captured, then displayed as a pulsating image on a giant plasma screen. As with many of Lozano-Hemmer’s pieces, the results from each participant appear incrementally in the artwork, shunting a previous picture off the screen in the process. You might feel an irrational sense of loss as your moment of “fame” passes. A number of installations
co-opt participation on the sly. Cameras record you before you are aware of them. “Who will see me, and how long will my image be stored?” you may wonder. No answers are provided. And while interacting with these installations is fun, it is hard to ignore the parallels with the intrusions of security cameras and the feelings of powerlessness that they engender. Sinister undertones aside, Recorders prompts playfulness. Whether it be recording silly noises to be played back to strangers in Microphones, or cartwheeling across the expanse of floor space in front of People on People’s giant projection in the hope that your image will appear at some point, the way we behave when we know we are observed has a frivolity about it. Indeed, you can have so much fun at Recorders that you might even forget yourself – although the exhibits will remember you, at least for a while.
The weird gets weirder Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to quantum teleportation by Anton Zeilinger, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $26 Reviewed by Dan Falk
MORE than a century after its birth, quantum theory is as perplexing as ever, and recent lab results have only underscored just how strange it is. No one is better qualified to describe the weirdness than University of Vienna physicist Anton Zeilinger, director of the Austrian lab where many of these experiments were done. We now know, for example, that quantum entanglement – dismissed by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance” – is real; a quantum system can indeed be in two states at the same time. Physicists can also transfer information from one quantum system to another, a feat known as quantum teleportation. Zeilinger is at his best when detailing the experiments behind these remarkable results. He also examines the philosophical issues they raise; questions that could well take another century to answer.
Ghost particle Neutrino by Frank Close, Oxford University Press, £9.99/$18.95 Reviewed by Manjit Kumar
FOR a moment in the late 1920s, Niels Bohr considered the unthinkable: abandoning the notion of conservation of energy. He wasn’t calling for its wholesale rejection, only that it be disregarded whenever a neutron decayed into a proton and an electron, as some energy appeared to go missing along the way.
Wolfgang Pauli, who was wont to damn poor ideas as “not even wrong”, came up with a solution he called “a terrible thing” – an unknown particle to account for the missing energy. Since it had to be electrically neutral with little or no mass, it was called the neutrino, the “little neutral one”. In this short and informative book, Frank Close recalls those who had the ingenuity and patience to catch and understand this elusive particle that barely interacts with other matter. Their successors are hunting neutrinos left over from the big bang, and no one knows what stories these relics will tell.
Divine gifts Galileo by John L. Heilbron, Oxford University Press, £20 Reviewed by Andrew Robinson
“FATHER of modern physics – indeed, of modern science altogether.” That is Albert Einstein’s verdict on Galileo Galilei. But you won’t find this quote in John Heilbron’s scholarly biography. Instead, his aim is to situate Galileo in the Florence, Rome and Venice of his day, rather than retread the wellbeaten path of his historical significance to science. Besides being a mathematician, physicist and inventor, Galileo was a notable philosopher, writer, musician and artist, who could recite vast stretches of Italian poetry by heart. It was the clarity of his exposition of the Copernican system of the planets in our solar system that got him into trouble with the Inquisition. This year is the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescopic revelations about our moon and the four largest moons of Jupiter. Given another 400 years, concludes Heilbron, “the church will recognise Galileo’s divine gifts… and make him a saint”. 6 November 2010 | NewScientist | 45
Watch and be watched
Peter Mallet
A playful interactive exhibition is loaded with sinister undertones
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Recorders Manchester Art Gallery, UK, until 30 January 2011 Reviewed by Kat Austen
RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER’S art takes a piece of you, traps it and exposes it to the world. Recorders, the Mexican-born artist’s new exhibition, uses interactive media to explore our fascination with watching ourselves. It also explores the disquieting feeling of being watched. In Pulse Index, participants volunteer to have their fingerprint and pulse rate captured, then displayed as a pulsating image on a giant plasma screen. As with many of Lozano-Hemmer’s pieces, the results from each participant appear incrementally in the artwork, shunting a previous picture off the screen in the process. You might feel an irrational sense of loss as your moment of “fame” passes. A number of installations
co-opt participation on the sly. Cameras record you before you are aware of them. “Who will see me, and how long will my image be stored?” you may wonder. No answers are provided. And while interacting with these installations is fun, it is hard to ignore the parallels with the intrusions of security cameras and the feelings of powerlessness that they engender. Sinister undertones aside, Recorders prompts playfulness. Whether it be recording silly noises to be played back to strangers in Microphones, or cartwheeling across the expanse of floor space in front of People on People’s giant projection in the hope that your image will appear at some point, the way we behave when we know we are observed has a frivolity about it. Indeed, you can have so much fun at Recorders that you might even forget yourself – although the exhibits will remember you, at least for a while.
The weird gets weirder Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to quantum teleportation by Anton Zeilinger, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $26 Reviewed by Dan Falk
MORE than a century after its birth, quantum theory is as perplexing as ever, and recent lab results have only underscored just how strange it is. No one is better qualified to describe the weirdness than University of Vienna physicist Anton Zeilinger, director of the Austrian lab where many of these experiments were done. We now know, for example, that quantum entanglement – dismissed by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance” – is real; a quantum system can indeed be in two states at the same time. Physicists can also transfer information from one quantum system to another, a feat known as quantum teleportation. Zeilinger is at his best when detailing the experiments behind these remarkable results. He also examines the philosophical issues they raise; questions that could well take another century to answer.
Ghost particle Neutrino by Frank Close, Oxford University Press, £9.99/$18.95 Reviewed by Manjit Kumar
FOR a moment in the late 1920s, Niels Bohr considered the unthinkable: abandoning the notion of conservation of energy. He wasn’t calling for its wholesale rejection, only that it be disregarded whenever a neutron decayed into a proton and an electron, as some energy appeared to go missing along the way.
Wolfgang Pauli, who was wont to damn poor ideas as “not even wrong”, came up with a solution he called “a terrible thing” – an unknown particle to account for the missing energy. Since it had to be electrically neutral with little or no mass, it was called the neutrino, the “little neutral one”. In this short and informative book, Frank Close recalls those who had the ingenuity and patience to catch and understand this elusive particle that barely interacts with other matter. Their successors are hunting neutrinos left over from the big bang, and no one knows what stories these relics will tell.
Divine gifts Galileo by John L. Heilbron, Oxford University Press, £20 Reviewed by Andrew Robinson
“FATHER of modern physics – indeed, of modern science altogether.” That is Albert Einstein’s verdict on Galileo Galilei. But you won’t find this quote in John Heilbron’s scholarly biography. Instead, his aim is to situate Galileo in the Florence, Rome and Venice of his day, rather than retread the wellbeaten path of his historical significance to science. Besides being a mathematician, physicist and inventor, Galileo was a notable philosopher, writer, musician and artist, who could recite vast stretches of Italian poetry by heart. It was the clarity of his exposition of the Copernican system of the planets in our solar system that got him into trouble with the Inquisition. This year is the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescopic revelations about our moon and the four largest moons of Jupiter. Given another 400 years, concludes Heilbron, “the church will recognise Galileo’s divine gifts… and make him a saint”. 6 November 2010 | NewScientist | 45