Science Loves Art

A song involving special relativity. In the words of the...

ipskaya — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:27:13 -0500

A song involving special relativity. In the words of the composer, Brian May,

“It’s a science fiction story. It’s the story about someone who goes away and leaves his family and… because of the time dilation effect, when you go away, the people on Earth have aged a lot more than he has when he comes home. He’s aged a year and they’ve aged 100 years. So, instead of coming back to his wife, he comes back to his daughter and he can see his wife in his daughter…”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2739

Math Plushies!

ipskaya — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:30:04 -0500

Math Plushies!:

Pictured above is a plush paraboloid, z = x^2 + y^2. Click the link above if you want a math plushie of your very own! Reblog if this project interests you.

Carrie Witherell from her series ‘Relics”, 2011 See more here

ipskaya — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 14:36:00 -0400

Carrie Witherell

from her series ‘Relics”, 2011

See more here

mothernaturenetwork: Alcohol is everywhere, but have you ever...

ipskaya — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:20:17 -0400

mothernaturenetwork:

Alcohol is everywhere, but have you ever thought of it as art? Have you ever seen your favorite drink through a microscope? BevShots is the brain child of researcher Michael Davidson, who first photographed crystallized drinks on a lab slide. The company maintains a catalog of microscopic slides of beer, wines and cocktails remade into art. Pictured here is whiskey.

10 images of alcohol as art

The Art of Mathematics

ipskaya — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:29:19 -0400

The Art of Mathematics:

By KELLY CROW

What if mathematical theories could be expressed using artworks instead of plus signs and pi symbols? Dorothea Rockburne has devoted four decades to the attempt, and the results are on view at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., through Aug. 14.

Take disjunction, the logical argument that if A is true and B is true, their combination must also be true. Math textbooks usually illustrate this idea with a pair of slightly overlapping circles. In the 1970s, Ms. Rockburne began exploring this idea by soaking long sheets of paper in crude oil, a substance that permeated the paper without breaking it down into pulp. Instead, both materials could co-exist.

In one of her best-known works, 1971’s “Scalar,” she arranged a group of these oily, rust-colored sheets on a wall so that they slightly overlapped. Other series involved folding or layering linen or painted sheets into kaleidoscopes.

In 1972, conceptual artist Mel Bochner praised her in an art magazine for doing “some of the most advanced thinking in art,” and museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston have since collected her work.

Earlier this week, Ms. Rockburne, age 78, sitting in her airy SoHo studio, said her artistic focus wasn’t always so cerebral. Growing up in Montreal, she drew nudes like every other academically trained student in the city’s School of Art and Design. When she arrived at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College in 1950, she said her classmates were mostly copying the messy abstractions of Willem de Kooning— except for a pair of “handsome” friends in her photography class, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

Like them, she had wearied of Abstract Expressionism, and they encouraged her to toy with other styles. But as years passed and their work won fame, she found herself working as a New York waitress, a single mother who spent her evenings in an apartment with too little room left to paint. Then she remembered Max Dehn, a math professor at Black Mountain whom she had admired in part because he seemed to revel in the rigor of hard thinking. She started reading math texts like Henri Poincaré’s “Science and Method” and hit upon an epiphany: “I wanted to see the math I was reading about.”

She eventually showed a few pieces to Mr. Rauschenberg, who put her work in a benefit group show at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1966. Within a few years, her career began to take off.

Some of the newest works in the Parrish show, “Dorothea Rockburne: In My Mind’s Eye,” depict blue and gold swirls, a nod to the theories that she’s been reading lately about what happens to star dust after neutron stars explode. “I never wanted to be a mathematician,” she said, “but I love the magic of it.”

scipsy: A tour of the cell [interactive]

ipskaya — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 03:01:41 -0400

scipsy:

A tour of the cell [interactive]

mothernaturenetwork: Chemical industry hooked on TV show...

ipskaya — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 02:59:40 -0400

mothernaturenetwork:

Chemical industry hooked on TV show ‘Breaking Bad’
The show has made it cool to like chemistry again, which explains why chemical industry executives, academics and shareholders are addicted.

curiositycounts: Graphing paper math quiz clock, one of several...

ipskaya — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 02:57:23 -0400

curiositycounts:

Graphing paper math quiz clock, one of several brilliant designy gifts for geeks

"Like curiosity, beauty is a motivational force, an emotional reaction not to the perfect or the..."

ipskaya — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 02:56:15 -0400

“Like curiosity, beauty is a motivational force, an emotional reaction not to the perfect or the complete, but to the imperfect and incomplete. We know just enough to know that we want to know more; there is something here, we just don’t what. That’s why we call it beautiful.”

- Why Does Beauty Exist? | Wired Science (via courtenaybird)

Hi I just saw that you reblogged my post about my pottery, I don't actually have pictures right now and it is currently in a show but I will submit pics as soon as I can!

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 18:40:08 -0400

That’s awesome! Can’t wait to see :D

lornblr: In my free time I look up models of different hormone molecules to draw onto my...

ipskaya — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 01:44:46 -0400

lornblr:

In my free time I look up models of different hormone molecules to draw onto my pottery

Would love to see! Pictures please?

whenindoubtapplymoreglitter: Images of different cell types...

ipskaya — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 01:41:30 -0400

whenindoubtapplymoreglitter:

Images of different cell types using different dyes, light wavelengths and filters. I want this as wallpaper.

hanjeanwat: Image from Laura Hughes’s Skin and Bones...

ipskaya — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 01:40:16 -0400

hanjeanwat:

Image from Laura Hughes’s Skin and Bones collection, part of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design’s web exhibition for the class MIAD-FA382

Follow her on tumblr here

artologica: Beautiful Blue Bugs 2 is an original watercolor of...

ipskaya — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 01:39:03 -0400

artologica:

Beautiful Blue Bugs 2 is an original watercolor of various forms of streptomyces, a type of bacteria that form the basis of many antibiotics. Under a microscope, they look like beautiful snowscapes or islands with white-sand beaches. So they’re pretty and helpful: what’s not to like?

The Color of Her Scream: A Short Film About Synesthesia

ipskaya — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:30:55 -0400

The Color of Her Scream: A Short Film About Synesthesia:

fyeahsynesthesia:

fyeahsynesthesia:

A friend of mine is doing a short film about synesthesia. Check it out and consider donating! If they reach their fundraising goal, they’ll have a synesthete make paintings for the film and have a professional director directing it. If this interests you but you can’t donate, please reblog!

I blogged about this a few weeks ago, but I figured I’d let my new followers know about it. Please donate or reblog if this interests you!

Photo

ipskaya — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 01:30:07 -0400

Photo

ipskaya — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:11:00 -0400

Brief Update

ipskaya — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:44:21 -0400

Hello followers! I have altered the layout of Science Loves Art to make it easier to browse. You can now look at posts based on specific sciences (biology, chemistry, etc.) or based on specific kinds of art (photography, clothing, etc.). Looking to buy something geeky for that special someone? Check out the for sale posts. Also check out sciencelovesart’s Etsy favorites on the sidebar. And as always, feel free to ask, comment, suggest, or submit!

mothernaturenetwork: Snuggle-worthy scienceBuck the summertime...

ipskaya — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 06:07:00 -0400

mothernaturenetwork:

Snuggle-worthy science
Buck the summertime tropical/nautical pillow trend and indulge your inner science dork by opting for Gus*Modern’s new organic cotton graphic pillow line featuring Venn diagrams, molecules and magnets.

science: Usually, when art and science, or science and...

ipskaya — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 06:05:45 -0400

science:

Usually, when art and science, or science and religion, intersect, they are seen as being in opposition. Art is free-flowing where science is rigorous; religion is faith-based where science needs evidence. But sometimes, the three actually intersect in ways that, at least to my eye, actually heighten the beauty of all of them. One such example is medieval Muslim ornamentation.

Imagine you have a fixed set of tile shapes, but you can have as many of each as you want. Can you tile them in such a way that you fill an infinite plane, with no gaps? If you can, you’ve got yourself a tiling. If you can shift the pattern around in some way, say, one unit to the left, so that the end result is the same as you started with, you’ve got a periodic tiling. But if any shift at all in the pattern creates a unique pattern, the tiling is said to be non-periodic. And if you’ve got a set of tile shapes that can only form non-periodic tilings, no matter what pattern you make with them, the set of tiles is said to be aperiodic. Until the mid-20th century, mathematicians doubted that there could be aperiodic tilings. But in the 1970s, Roger Penrose discovered a set of very simple tiles that—if you apply a couple of restrictions to how they can be arranged (restrictions that can be made superfluous if you give the tiles some bumps)—are aperiodic, i.e., no matter how you arrange these tiles, and no matter how large a plane you tile, you will never find a periodic pattern. They’re called Penrose tiles.

This was new knowledge. No one knew about this until Western mathematics started exploring this in the mid-20th century. Or so we thought.

Because of Islam’s restrictions on religious iconography, such as depicting living beings, Islamic artists have found ways to make the most of abstract patterns and shapes. You see it in Arabic calligraphy, and you see it in the magnificent shapes on the walls of mosques and religious schools. In 2007, physicists Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt discovered that the patterns on the walls of medieval Islamic buildings very closely resemble Penrose tilings. The crucial invention of girih tiles, basic shapes used to build more complex patterns, allowed Islamic architects to decorate their walls with non-periodic tilings. And in the Darb-e Imam shrine in Ishafan, Iran, built around 1450 (above), the tiles almost perfectly form a pattern that can be generalized as a Penrose tiling. If you deconstruct the pattern on the Darb-e Imam shrine into Penrose tiles, you’ll find that only 11 out of 3700 are mismatched, and the mismatch is so small that it’s “removable with a local rearrangement of a few tiles without affecting the rest of the pattern”. (more)