Universe

Lisa Rawlinson

Universe

Universe 2017 | gouache on 10 giclée photo prints | each 18" x 24"
Subtitles top row (left to right): Entropy, Relativity, Quanta, Transmutation, Emergence
Subtitles bottom row (left to right): Probability, Obscurity, Entanglement, Expansion, Consciousness

November 6, 2017

Squeezing the entire universe into one work of art is a pretty tall order, but I gave it a shot.

I have a memory from when I was a young child of asking what came before the Big Bang. The answer "nothing" was as unsatisfying to my kid brain as it is to my adult brain. The cogs were already in motion and while long fascinated by astronomy and physics, this piece was inspired by my more recent exploration of current scientific research. In my lifetime our understandings of the universe and the nature of reality have made some great leaps, not necessarily answering the big questions, but constraining them and opening up new areas of exploration that a few decades ago would have seemed extraordinary. And despite current cultural and political challenges to the practice of science, it seems to me that we are living in another golden era of scientific exploration and learning—a beautiful, fascinating bubble that deserves to be looked at and absorbed as best we can.

Each of the 10 panels in this work represents an aspect about the universe I felt was a compelling part of a larger puzzle. They demonstrate our capacity for learning and uncovering aspects of reality that are beyond our immediate sensory perceptions while making clear how much we still have to discover about the universe and ultimately ourselves. There was considerable editing to narrow it down to ten items, but I felt that these things could spiral outward to encompass other relevant pieces of the puzzle.

Using a photo I took at Big Bend National Park of its iconic peak Casa Grande and the Milky Way as a backdrop for each panel, metaphors for complex concepts are suggested with only minimal elements. It's an invitation into a deep pool of thought, regardless of familiarity or comfort level with more advanced scientific ideas. Asking ontological questions about the bigger picture is a basic part of the human experience. It manifests in different ways, sometimes taking on religious or spiritual tones, sometimes through science, sometimes through art and literature and other creative pursuits. While there's plenty of crossover, these endeavors have often been at odds with each other culturally. But at their most basic levels, they all share the same root of trying to understand our existence. This work continues that centuries old tradition of asking questions, but it's asking them in the context of recent strides in science and in my own very personal way (which is somewhat a combination of most of those things). More than anything, this work was a way for me to consolidate and organize a lot of information that does not always neatly connect in a clear way, but somehow does connect.

The following are brief descriptions of each panel and the ideas and science behind them. There is no way to be all-inclusive in my descriptions (or in my depictions), but they provide a base from which to launch further thinking. At least that's the idea.

Entropy

Entropy here speaks to the arrow of time, which seems like one of those obvious realities that should be unquestionable in its basic nature. There is a past, present, and future, and we as human beings are bound to it. We can't age backwards. We can't unspill milk (regardless of whether we cry over it or not). Likewise, the universe seems bound to that same one-directional path, from it's quantum-sized fireball at the point of the Big Bang, through it's soupy, homogenous exponential inflation, through early star and galaxy formation, right up to today. Entropy is the one place in physics where the arrow of time is inseparable from its very nature. And we are finding at some levels of reality (at the quantum level) that time—at least as we experience it—does not appear to be a constant, but rather an emergent property that only complex systems such as ourselves and planets or galaxies are bound to.

Relativity

The simple act of turning a landscape and night sky on its head removes it from the confines of how our personal experience frames reality. There is no up in space. Time and space, or space-time, are distorted by objects with significant mass. We can and do set our clocks by that fundamental fact, no matter how counterintuitive it feels to how we experience the world. Albert Einstein handily blew open a whole new way to look at and interpret the universe with his theories of general and special relativity after centuries of classical physics ruling the day. His theories have stood the test of relativistic time. Subtle black-on-black concentric circles within the shape of Casa Grande are a nod to the recent detection of gravitational waves, which are just one more confirmation of his contributions.

Quanta

Quantum mechanics could be said to define our twenty-first century lives. Without it, we would have no computers, no smart phones, no robotics (and get ready for that technological explosion). Through some really impressive human ingenuity we are able to apply the behaviors of quantum mechanics in a practical and useful way, but explaining the why behind those behaviors still eludes us. A lot of brilliant minds have gone into attempting to describe/measure/detect/predict/what not that basic why. It's an intricate web of collaboration and disagreement that challenges people to reconsider and reevaluate and then pushes us a little bit closer, and then a little bit closer to understanding this very, very basic part of reality. But it's a part of reality that has appeared contradictory to macro level behaviors such as relativity. And yet computers work. Smart phones work. Our clocks which take special relativity into account work. This apparent disparity has been one of science's biggest puzzles for quite a while now. Each are parts of a reality that do not clearly connect in a neat way, but do connect. The web in this panel is an extremely pared down depiction of that interconnectivity as well as of a quantum gravitational field, which attempts to bridge the why between the macro and the micro (or the quantum), as described by physicist Carlo Rovelli. Do we have a decisive answer? Nope. But there is an answer, and I suspect when we figure it out we'll all be hitting our foreheads and exclaiming, "Doh!"

Transmutation

The ouroboros (snake eating its tail) was a symbol used by alchemists centuries ago, alluding to the cycle of birth and death, of beginnings from endings. In their search to find the ultimate fundamental essence to release themselves from that cycle and achieve immortality, the alchemists invented the modern scientific process and the science of chemistry while attempting to transform various materials into more precious ones such as silver and gold. At that time, they could have no idea that they were essentially attempting to recreate the natural processes in the universe from which all elements are created. I use the ouroboros here to refer to those chemical processes and to that cycle of beginnings from endings, with the metallic gold and silver paint specifically referring to heavy elements being created through cosmic events. The colliding neutron stars that were recently observed (after this piece was completed) on both the electromagnetic spectrum and via the gravitational waves they produced are a perfect example of that process.

Emergence

In science, emergence is when a complex system emerges from a less complx system. Particles emerge into atoms. Atoms emerge into molecules. Molecules emerge into cells. Cells emerge into tissue, and so on and so forth until you end up with complex organisms or systems like us. That's one example, but the same principle can be applied to a rock or any other type of matter. They are layers of reality, each with a set of rules and behaviors that apply to that particular layer. The electrons in an atom pop in and out of orbitals around a nucleus, absorbing and releasing energy from photons (light particles) as they go. Cells split or mutate, and by all appearances that has nothing to do with what's going on with energy absorption within the atoms that comprise them. This is a way of organizing information into manageable chunks. And it's a question I have about whether that human-imposed organization, no matter how useful it is, blocks our ability to see connections between layers that might not be glaringly obvious. The colorful shapes here act as a metaphor for this idea, emerging or floating off of the dark plane behind them.

Probability

With Probability we zoom back down to the quantum level, to a slice of reality where the lines between energy and matter become fuzzier, where a particle does not materialize until it interacts with something else, such as another particle. The trick is in attempting to predict where and when it will materialize, and it's here where the more definitive nature of reality as described by classical physics or physics at a macro level proves itself unworthy to the task. This panel shows a probability wave graph, using Casa Grande as the baseline for zero and the gold burst acting as the materialized particle. Where the peaks and troughs are larger there is a higher probability that it will materialize, but it could appear in any peak or trough, just never at the point where the line intersects the zero point. Complicated, I know. But the take away is that quantum physics at this point in time can only factor in the probable existence of a particle not its exact location, and that in between the points where it materializes (through an interaction with something else), it exists as energy.

Obscurity

This panel plays off of a pie chart, using the silhouette of Casa Grande as the pie. The larger black area represents dark energy while the smaller black area represents dark matter. The orange slice is hydrogen and helium gas while that tiny yellow sliver is everything else: stars, heavy elements, neutrinos, you, me, your house, your family. Both dark energy and dark matter are a mystery, their existence only evident because of their effects on other things. It's almost inspirational how much of what exists our human brains have been able to comprehend. Visionary imagination, methodical exploration, and sheer ingenuity have made it possible to detect everything from microscopic viruses to the subatomic particles that vibrate within them, and the great, interconnected wall of galaxy clusters and billions of years back in time to cosmic background radiation (the latter is what helps us determine these percentages). It's impressive, and it should give us hope. But if anything demonstrates just how much still lies in obscurity, it's this simple chart. That doesn't diminish or disprove anything we have learned so far, but it should give us perspective, and at least from my point of view, generate excitement over all that's still to be discovered.

Entanglement

You may have heard of this whole spooky action at a distance thing that has been in mentioned in article after article shared on social media. That's entanglement. It's okay if you didn't understand it. The gist is that two particles can be made to become entangled with each other so that their behavior is linked and mirrors each other. If one turns left, the other turns right at exactly the same angle and moment. That's a simplified description, but I think it does a better job of communicating the basic idea than elaborately over-complicated metaphors about twins in Paris versus New York cafés (if you've read those articles you know what I'm talking about). That's cool and all, but the really cool stuff comes when those particles mirror each other's behavior across distances great enough that the information would have had to travel faster than the speed of light in order to reach each other. On top of that, we've consistently been able to arrange the experiment so that when one of the entangled particles is tampered with to create a specific reaction its paired particle has already mirrored that action. By "already" I mean before, like as if the information not only traveled faster than light, but it traveled backwards in time. I'd need a lot more space to explain this properly, but refer back to the Entropy panel where I suggested that time as we experience it is being shown to not be a constant at a quantum level. Mind blown? Good. This is the fun stuff. The number of questions and implications that arise should be plain enough here.

Expansion

Simplified spiral galaxies extend outward from a central point, indicative of the state of increased expansion of our universe. As light moves farther away, the wavelengths are stretched and shifted towards the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Red shift is how we know that all except one of the galaxies we can currently observe are moving away from us and how we know that at this point in time the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. Exactly what caused this acceleration and exactly what comes next is still to be determined, but the predominant theory is that the era of a matter-dominated universe has given way to an energy-dominated universe, specifically dark energy. Graphically, the color scheme and composition in this panel are intended to create a visual and metaphorical bridge back to Entropy and the overall evolution of our universe.

Consciousness

It goes like this: the universe exponentially expanded. Energy levels were so high and temperatures so hot that particles materialized and dematerialized all over the place, interacting with each other but unable to fuse together until the universe cooled enough that atoms began to form. Atoms begat dark matter. Dark matter created a gravitational well where ordinary matter collected and gradually formed the first stars. Through natural processes and a cycle of beginnings from endings, galaxies and planets and living creatures developed. No one knows how or when or through what mechanism or to exactly which of those living creatures this applies to, but consciousness exists. I just created a whole 10-panel piece of art pondering the nature of reality and the universe, then spent a huge chunk of time writing about it. You may or may not have made it this far reading, but either way, my guess is you'd agree that you are a conscious being. Philosophers have debated the existence of consciousness for centuries, but come on. That's just silly. The fascinating part is that consciousness is a gigantic question mark. I would like to be clear that this whole exercise was not an attempt to make any point other than to shed light on that question mark and how remarkable of a thing consciousness is. In the end, that one is the ultimate question. How in all of this did it come to be that we can make art and fall in love and murder each other and contrive elaborate rule systems that act to protect the aims of the few over the many and imagine possibilities and develop technology that allowed us to figure out all that we have, despite all that we haven't? Heck if I know. Nor does anyone else, not really.

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Check out my interview on the podcast Who Are These People? to hear about how I use science in art and some musings on gravitational waves (a couple of factual inaccuracies included, oh well).