Tag Archives: Space

The art and beauty of general relativity

Margaret Wertheim is Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in Science Communication, The University of Melbourne. She is an internationally noted writer and exhibition curator whose work focuses on relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. The author of six books, including ‘The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,’ a groundbreaking exploration of the history of Western concepts of space from Dante to the Internet.

Wertheim is the founder and director of the Institute For Figuring, a Los Angeles-based organization devoted to the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of mathematics and science. (www.theiff.org) Through the IFF, she has designed exhibitions for galleries and museums in a dozen countries, including the Hayward Gallery in London and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. The IFF’s “Crochet Coral Reef” project – spearheaded by Margaret and twin sister Christine – is the largest participatory science-and-art endeavor in the world, and has been shown at the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), the Science Gallery (Dublin), New York University Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere. Through an unlikely conjunction of handicraft and geometry, the Crochet Coral Reef offers a window into mathematics while addressing the issue of reef degradation due to global warming. Wertheim’s TED talk on the topic has been viewed more than a million times, and translated into 20 languages, including Arabic.

Five ways artificial intelligence can help space exploration

Deep Bandivadekar is a PhD student at the Aerospace Centre of Excellence, University of Strathclyde and does research work as part of the Intelligent Computational Engineering Laboratory (ICE-Lab). His research interests are Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Thermodynamics, Hypersonics, Artificial Intelligence, Design Optimisation, Global and Multi-objective Optimisation.

Audrey Berquand is a PhD candidate in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Strathclyde. Her research question asks – “Can all the data and lessons learned harvested online, collected from previous current and future studies, be reused and enhanced with computational intelligence methods to advance current concurrent engineering design processes and decision making at the early phases of space missions design?”

We’re teaching robots to evolve autonomously – so they can adapt to life alone on distant planets

Professor Emma Hart is Chair in Natural Computation, Edinburgh Napier University. She is active world-wide in the field of Evolutionary Computation, an Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) from January 2016 and an elected member of the ACM SIGEVO Executive Board. She is also a member of the UK Operations Research Society Research Panel.

What is nothing? Martin Rees Q&A

Lord Martin Rees is Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal. Lord Rees is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of the Existential Risk, an early stage initiative which brings together a scientist, philosopher and software entrepreneur.

Topology and the Visualization of Space

Artist and author, Tony Robbin, works with painting, sculpture and computer visualizations. He is a pioneer in the computer visualization of four-dimensional geometry. With his paintings and innovative computer visualizations of hyperspace, he continues to investigate different models of the fourth dimension and how these are applied in art and physics.

Cosmic alchemy: Colliding neutron stars show us how the universe creates gold

Duncan Brown is the Charles Brightman Professor of Physics at Syracuse University. He works on gravitational-wave astronomy and astrophysics.

Edo Berger is Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. He researches a wide range of explosive and eruptive astrophysical phenomena, including gamma-ray bursts, tidal disruption events, super-luminous supernovae, and other optical transients (from the Pan-STARRS project and elsewhere), as well as magnetic activity in sub-stellar objects.

Laura Krasnow: the_space_between_the_stars

Laura Krasnow uses the medium of photography to explore the connections between the artistic and scientific realms of inquiry.

Working with traditional and non-traditional art making tools, including printmaking, digital photography, film and Polaroid film, drawing and paint, she seeks to interpret theories of physics, math and neurological research, to reconstruct individual recollections of time, place, and space.

Missing Mass

Experimenting with ideas of time, space and physicality, Carey Young’s body of artistic work explores law as a separate kind of ‘reality’, one with its own inherent subjectivities and points of breakdown.

‘Missing Mass’ (2010) is a sculptural work created with the scientific guidance of Prof. Malcolm Fairbairn, an astrophysicist based at King’s College London and is exhibited at the Science Gallery, London exhibition ‘Dark Matter: 95% of the Universe is missing’.

Voices

Aura Satz is Moving Image Tutor and Reader in Fine Art (Sound and Moving Image) on the Contemporary Art Practice programme at the Royal College of Art.

Aura Satz’s work encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. Her work centres on the trope of ventriloquism in order to conceptualise a distributed, expanded and shared notion of voice. Works are made in conversation and use dialogue as both method and subject matter.
Satz has made a body of work centred on various sound technologies in order to explore notation systems, code and encryption, and ways in which these might resist standardisation, generating new soundscapes, and in turn new forms of listening and attending to the other.