Levels
of Matter
The
famous film, Powers of Ten, explores the different
scales of matter from small quarks to huge galaxies.
Myrrh, too, is fascinated with this, and has discovered a paradox!
Read to the bottom to find it. |
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The
World of Small and Large
The
painting shows different scales, beginning
with tracks (in pink) of elementary parti-
cles recorded in a physics experiment.
Other tracks coming from the galaxy
down to Earth represent cosmic rays.
To show the complete contrast
in sizes, we need to consider the
billion billion galaxies in
the universe as well!
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Conjecture
In 1977,
while
arranging hexagonal
science diagrams, Myrrh decided to arr-
ange them according to how large they are.
Some of the choices of diagrams are
not easy to explain briefly, but her idea
gave rise to the diagram below:
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Horns
of Plenty
Visualizing the above as a diagram,
we find a strange loop: Thought can imagine space!
(Einstein discovered that elementary particles,
in some strange way, are "made
of" space).
Reductionism
Reductionism is a set of assumptions
in science for simplifying investigation.
These assumptions have infiltrated how we think, but are they correct?
This diagram uncovers a great paradox, (but you have to know about
quantum
physics, which defines "particles" as
"events" that have been observed)
The snake consuming itself is an ancient
paradox called an uroboros.
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The
World of Small and Large is a 45- inch painting
on 1/8-inch Plexiglas. a colored version of Conjecture is
available in the same format. These acrylic paintings are backlit.
However, the black and white drawings are quite small, less
than 8 inches, executed on scratchboard for Myrrh's 1990
article in Leonardo,
"An Artist Explores the Concept of Levels in Matter," Vol.23
#.1. |
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