Tag Archives: Space

How the James Webb deep field images reminded me the divide between science and art is artificial

Cherine Fahd is an artist and academic working in photography and video performance. Cherine has a PhD from Monash University and is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at University of Technology Sidney. Cherine’s current research focuses on the ways photography and portraiture bring people together, facilitate trust and build social connections. She writes broadly on photography and creativity practice, publishing across various platforms, including The Conversation, academic journals, and art and design contexts. Her artistic projects have been exhibited and commissioned nationally and internationally, including for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Sydney Opera House; Carriageworks, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Japan, among others.

James Webb telescope: a scientist explains what its first, amazing images show – and how it will change astronomy

Martin Barstow is Professor of Astrophysics and Space Science, University of Leicester.
He is also the president of the Royal Astronomical Society and Pro-Vice Chancellor as well as Head of the College of Science & Engineering. He is chair of the Space Telescope Institute Council, which will operate James Webb Space Telescope. He is already working on proposals for an even larger space telescope to follow that.
Martin’s research interests are the study of hot white dwarf stars and the surrounding interstellar medium. He has been involved in many space missions during his career, including NASA’s Voyager probes, which travelled to the outer planets of the Solar System. More recently he has worked on the Hubble Space Telescope helping to develop the plans for the final servicing mission, which took place in May 2009. He leads the Leicester contribution to the ESA Gaia mission.

World Lines

Paul Friedlander is an artist who first trained as a physicist. He became fascinated by art involving the use of movement and light in the late 1960s. In 1983 he made an important discovery of the chaotic properties of spinning string and invented chromastrobic light – “light that changes colour faster than the human eye can see”. Many of his works make use of persistence of vision, a property of how light is perceived combined with movement to create a three-dimensional kinetic body of light in sculptural form. Friedlander applies his scientific knowledge to his art and is heavily influenced by chaos theory, string theory and cosmology. He continues to show his light sculptures around the world in art and science museums and festivals.

Say hello to Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy

Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has over 180 refereed publications on observational cosmology, galaxies, and quasars, and his research has been supported by $20 million in NASA and NSF grants. He has won eleven teaching awards and has taught three massive open online classes with over 180,000 enrolled. Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society and he has been an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, Carnegie Council’s Arizona Professor of the Year, and most recently, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He’s written over 70 popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology, two introductory textbooks, a novel called ‘Shadow World’, and eight popular science books: ‘The Living Cosmos’, ‘How It Ends’, ‘Talking About Life’, ‘How It Began’, ‘Dreams of Other Worlds’, ‘Humble Before the Void’, ‘Beyond: The Future of Space Travel’, and ‘Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes’.

Warp factor: we’ve observed a spinning star that drags the very fabric of space and time

Matthew Bailes is ARC Laureate Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology. In 2015 he was awarded an Australia Research Council Laureate Fellowship to work on the discovery of Fast Radio Bursts. He was the founding Director of the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology from its inception in 1998 until 2010. He is currently the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav).

Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan is part of the Scientific staff, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy
“I am an Astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. I use large radio telescopes to observe dead stars and understand gravity”.

Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay

Sam Baron is Associate Professor, Australian Catholic University. His present research focuses on the connection between key topics in the philosophy of mathematics concerning mathematical ontology, and topics in the philosophy of time concerning temporal ontology. A central focus of this research is the role of truthmaking and non-causal explanation in arguments both for and against particular ontological views.
Dr Baron is currently investigating the role of non-causal explanation in the indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical objects, as well as timelessness in theories of quantum gravity and timelessness in metaphysics more generally.

Rohini Devasher: One Hundred Thousand Suns

Rohini Devasher is an international artist and amateur astronomer based in Delhi, India. Her practice spans film, drawing and printmaking, mapping the ‘antagonism’ of time and space. ‘One Hundred Thousand Suns’ is another kind of rendering of the Sun, assembled from data that is both historical and contemporary. work explores the notion that there may be multiple readings and avatars of data depending on the site, the observer, and the mode and method of observation, collection and preservation.

Time Waves (II)

Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 40 years. He studied Fine Art and Physics before founding The Interalia Centre in 1990. Since then, he has lectured extensively on art and science and written articles on James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy and Susan Derges, among others. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and was the recipient of the ‘Visions of Science’ Award, The Edge, Andrew Brownsward Gallery, University of Bath (Second Prize Winner). Co-author of ‘The Art of Science’ (Welbeck Publishers, 2021).

Alain Negre: Contemporary Cosmology and Traditional Representation of the Whole

The contemporary cosmological narrative is linked to a traditional symbolic representation of the whole. The number, in the qualitative sense, allows a link between the physically knowable reality and the imaginary World-Soul. Thus, the quaternary is reflected in four fundamental cosmological events, two of which are of the simple attractor type with the other two characterized by strong emergence. The ternary is revealed through a three-moment dialectic, chiseled into the cosmic becoming by the fundamental forces of physics. The reflections of these two archetypal numbers thus offer another glimpse of the universe and, from a perspective between different orders of reality, may also offer food for thought about certain new relationships between cosmological events.

How could the Big Bang arise from nothing?

Alastair Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, working on metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science and philosophy of physics. His doctoral thesis was on the metaphysics of Everettian (many-worlds) quantum mechanics, and this line of thought culminated in his book The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism (OUP, 2020). More recently he has worked on explanation and dependence in physics and metaphysics as part of his ERC-funded project FraMEPhys, on metaphysical explanation in physics. He has also worked on laws of nature, chance, properties, causation, counterfactuals, and the epistemology of disagreement and of self-locating beliefs. He was President of the Society for the Metaphysics of Science in 2017-18 and Honorary Secretary of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science in 2018-19. He remains on the SMS and BSPS committees, and is also a member of the climate task force of the Philosophy of Science Association and a Trustee of the Philosophy of Physics Association. He is PhilPapers editor for the categories ‘Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’ and ‘Theories of Modality’, and a Managing Editor of the open-access journal Ergo.