I am creating art grounded in physics and math – generated with pencils, code, or digital pen (No AI). Physics PhD, worked on: Heat pumps, superconductors, cyber security.
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Reality and Imagination
Reality and Imagination is a series of thirteen images generated by custom, hand-crafted computer code. Each image shows the same virtual sculpture from a different viewpoint. I call it virtual as its shape is solely defined by a mathematical function – an object existing in the human mind, in the platonic realm of ideal objects.…
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Geometry of the Motion of a Free Prolate Gyroscope (and the Power of Magnets)
How should I spin the story of the gyroscope this time? Imagine, you have a wonderfully crafted elongated ellipsoid from wood (shaped like a rugby ball). You built some apparatus that make it spin fast about its major axis. Probably you can make it spin with your bare hands – or you ask a tentacled…
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Osculating Circles Revisited
Every squiggly line could be an image of the meandering trajectory of a particle. At each instant, the path has a direction and a curvature. Curvature can be represented by the circle that fits the curve best – the osculating circle. In a two-dimensional world, the osculating circles would lie flat in the same plane…
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Diamond Cubic
Once upon a time I analyzed electron diffraction patterns. They looked like this: These patterns are the inverse of the crystal lattices, sort of. The regularity of the dots represents the symmetries of the physical crystal. To identify the material causing a certain pattern, you compared it with sample patterns in a “database”. I am…
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Aharonov-Bohm Effect
It is often called the simplest example of topology impacting physics (Topology like “the shape of space”, like coffee mugs being donuts!). Charged particles move under the the influence of electric and magnetic fields. The concept of fields was once introduced to replace action at a distance: If one charge tugs on another, it does…
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Mass Shell
Space and time are rotated into each other. Momentum and energy are as well. This rotation in four dimensions is of an unusual, hyperbolic kind. Which is the source of all so-called paradoxa in special relativity. Best to avoid thinking of clocks, rulers, trains, and observers. Just stick to the geometry. When a classical particle…
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Postal Scales Now and Then
I’ve tried to stage it properly. But it just looks sad. Functional – and not inspiring: The white plastic casing already starts to yellow at the top, from years of bombardment with UV photons. Its function in our office had been replaced … by not sending invoices or contracts on paper anymore. Edit: The original…
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Poetry: Representations
Finally, a revelation! I was asking myself: Why do I often find ancient, terse, illustration-free textbooks easier to follow than their modern, friendly, playful, illustrated, multi-media-enhanced counterparts? Case in point (and I know that not everybody will agree): Paul Dirac’s legendary Principles of Quantum Mechanics or the definitive course on theoretical physics, the volumes by…
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Hello, World – from Code to Canvas
I have promised to report on my progress with presenting my digital art on canvas. but I had been sidetracked by inverted drawings. So, I created a first – and very modest – descriptive geometry drawing by code: I have tried to explain here what this software does; it is very different from my other…
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Magneto Compass – Inverted Art
It has been quite a while since I have drawn my antique rotary phone as “negative art”. This phone features white letters on black background. At that time I had no idea that white gel pens exist, for drawing such letters. So, I “invented” inverted art – as usual, only to discover that many artists…
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Vintage Temperature Waves
There might be three people among my active followers who still remember when this blog was primarily about hard science and tech – without artistic adornments. These were the glory days of the internet, in the early 2010s. When social media had not yet defeated small blogs. We had our German heat pump and energy…
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Dare to Be Negative!
Do you remember analog photo negatives? I still have some, tucked away deep in the archives. I always found them eerie and uncanny. Humans turned into zombies with black teeth. Burnt orange, weird cyan and violet everywhere. But what did I expect? We don’t have an intuition for addition or subtraction of colors. Would you…
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Circles to Lines (2026)
Circles and lines – that sounded manageable. So, this was one of my first attempts at reviving descriptive geometry. A circle on a sphere is projected into a circle in the equatorial plane under stereographic projection. But if the source circle contains the North Pole, the projection ray in this point becomes tangent to the…
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Drawing With Code
What does it even mean? I see two main ways of drawing with code: 1) going for a representation of a thing you have in mind, or 2) using an algorithm and elements of randomness to surprise you. Representational I have code-drawn Lissajous curves with code – from a picture in mind before I started.…
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On Descriptive Geometry
I keep forgetting I am writing for an international audience here! Having referred to Descriptive Geometry (DG) often, I doubt that everybody associates similar mental images with it. Anybody remembering the trace of a plane, for example? Learning about the history and culture of Descriptive Geometry, I realize it is rooted in a European tradition…
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Archaic Mathematical Art – and Poetry – from Code
What is the simplest way of creating art with code? I have been using software frameworks for mathematics and graphics in the past year. They “abstract away” how you actually place the dots on the virtual canvas. But I want something ancient, with a clear-cut boundary. My choice is the language C: created in the…
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Coping with the AI Apocalypse
Painstakingly, I was putting the finishing touches on my analog geometric art – when this video popped into several of my social media feeds: We Need To Talk About AI… by Cool Worlds Podcast Cool Worlds Podcast is run by a team at Columbia University and usually features guests interviewed by physicist David Kipping. This…
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Coffee-Powered Stargate
Let me open the Stargate of Diffraction for you, once again! This is as close as I ever got to a plain scientific visualization: No 3D effects, just the intensity of diffracted radiation as a function of position in space. If you use a sun catcher – a film with a diffraction grating – the…