Jiggling Atoms from Virtualburn on Vimeo.
Inspired by two of my favorite thinkers, artist Yoko Ono and physicist Richard Feynman, this article is an experiment in physics and event scores. It quotes Feynman’s enchanting stories about a teeming nano-world for a 1983 BBC interview Physics is fun to imagine, recontextualising some of his thoughts as proposal pieces in the spirit of Grapefruit, an artist’s book by Ono.
In the BBC footage, Feynman wonders how some people find science so easy, and others find it dull and difficult – like children, for instance. “In the case of science, I think one of the things that makes it very difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination,” he says. “It’s very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like. Nothing’s really as it seems. [...] But I find myself trying to imagine all kinds of things all the time. And I get a kick out of it.”
Exploring our place in the cosmos, the following transcripts and performance instructions aim to create an experience of science.
Water drop piece
Richard Feynman: “You see a little drop of water, a tiny drop. [...] The atoms in it attract each other. They like to be next to each other. They want as many partners as they can get. Now, the guys that are on the surface of the drop have only partners on one side, so they’re trying to get in. You can imagine this team of people all moving very fast, all wanting to get as many partners as possible, and the guys at the edge are very unhappy and nervous, and they keep on pounding in. And that’s what makes the drop a tight ball instead of flat – surface tension.”
Take a mannerism from an atom in a drop of water.
Gather a group of people in the same room for an hour.
Remain surrounded by a person on each side of you at all times.
Rubber band piece
“Most elastic things like steel springs and so on are nothing but this electrical thing pulling the atoms a little bit apart when you bend something, and then they try to come back together again. But rubber bands work on a different principle. There are some long molecules like chains that are kind of kinky and knocked about in shape. When you pull open the rubber band, the chains get straighter but they are being bombarded on the side by other little atoms trying to shorten them by kinking them, so they’re trying to pull back. [...] I’ve always found it fascinating to think, that when rubber bands are sitting on an old package of papers for a long time, holding them together, it’s done by a perpetual pounding, pounding, pounding of the atoms against these chains, trying to kink them for a long time, trying to hold this thing together.”
Wear a rubber band on your waist.
Eat a sandwich.
Think about the atoms that are pounding on your stomach.
Mirror Piece
“You look in a mirror, and let’s say you part your hair on the right side, but the image has its hair parted on the left side. So, the image is left and right mixed up. It’s not top and bottom mixed up because the top of the head in the image is still up there at the top, and the bottom of the feet are on the bottom. But how does the mirror know how to get the left and right mixed up but not the up and down? [...] It takes a lot of fiddling to describe what a mirror does. If you wave this hand, the waving hand in the mirror is right opposite it. The hand in the East is the hand in the East and the hand in the West is the hand in the West, and the head that’s up is up and the feet that are down are down. Everything’s really alright. But what’s wrong is that if this is North, your nose is to the North of the back of your head but in the image, the nose remains to the south of the back of the head. So, what actually happens in the image is neither mixing up the left and the right, nor the top and the bottom, but the front and back have been reversed. The nose of the image is on the wrong side of the head. Now, when we think of the image, we think of it as another person. And if we think of the normal way that a person would get into that condition over there, we don’t think of the idea that the person has been squashed and pushed backwards forwards with his nose and his head, because that’s not what ordinarily happens to people.”
Mirror all photographs of yourself on Photoshop.
Destroy the originals.
Swimming Pool piece
“If I’m sitting next to a swimming pool and somebody dives in [...], I think of the waves that are formed in the water. When lots of people have dived in the pool, there’s a great choppiness of all these waves all over the water. And to think that it might be possible that in those waves there are clues to what’s happening in the pool. [...] Someone with sufficient cleverness could just sit by the pool and figure out who jumped in; where, and when, by the nature of the irregularities and the bumping of the waves. [...] When we’re looking at something, the light that comes out is waves – just like in the swimming pool. It’s just that it’s in three dimensions.”
Look at the waves in a swimming pool.
Imagine what caused them.
Reconstruct that movement.