Category: Physics
I am thinking out loud about well-known mathematical physics. Re-learning an re-viving the basics again and again.
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Geometry of the Physics of the Gyroscope – on a Coffee Mug!
Construct the Labyrinth from Which You Plan to Escape … has been the motto of the Oulipo movement, French writers and mathematicians who have boosted their creative writing by imposing arbitrary constraints. I had practiced Oulipo long before I knew the term. I just called it Search Term Poetry or Spam Poetry. I have been…
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The Aesthetics of Science
Many years ago I was shooting laser beams on stuff. “Stuff” was superconducting ceramic discs – though not superconducting at the time of bombarding it with short laser pulses :) Material evaporated in an instant and formed a delicate cloud, called a plasma plume. I added a small image of how that looked like to…
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New Art Prints and Merch Store: Canvas Prints, Coffee Mugs, and Blankets with Physics-Inspired Art!
The title is the whole message, but let me add a mysterious trailer first! For years, I have been flying trough my structures from mathematical physics… Oscilloscopic Dance. Flying through virtual structures built from 3D Lissajous figures. … searching for the best viewpoint to take a snapshot. Searching for the art within the math. Searching…
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Evil Ellipsoids and Spheres (Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship #4)
Do you remember how photo negatives looked like? The inverted versions of the most common colors looked so unreal. Hues of orange, violet, or cyan that you never saw in the real world. Happy smiling human people looked like turquoise zombies with an evil grin. When creating this geometric drawing, I haven’t been thinking about…
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Lissajous Figures – Nostalgia and Innovation
Where did the impulse to draw 3D Lissajous figures come originally? I was looking for a compact three-dimensional curved shape. It should be symmetrical enough to allow for “easy geometrical doubling” of some points. But it should be asymmetrical enough to look surprisingly different from different viewpoints! Finding uncommon ways of looking at 3D structures…
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Dreaming of a Magnetic Field
Do you feel the magnetic field? Do you dream of of it? I sure do! … having completed this project: These are the flow lines of the magnetic generated by a circular current loop. They look almost like ellipses, embracing an (almost) torus. Each field line encircles the tiny current loop in the center. The…
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Celebration of Dispersion
Light is economic. It takes the minimal path. It follows the Principle of Least Time! When light is reflected, the angles of incidence of original ray and reflected ray are the same. This might seem natural. But you can derive it from the Principle of Least Time – also called Fermat’s Principle. If we want…
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Dirac’s Belt Trick Through the Years
2021 It started with a humble sketch. This has been the first time I drew something after decades of not touching pencils or brushes. It kicked off an obsession – with art in general, but also with Dirac’s Belt trick. The trick is a demonstration of the underappreciated weirdness of rotations in three-dimensional space. You…
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Bumblebees and Ellipsoids (Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship #3)
In the movie Ice Age, Manny the Mammoth says he is not fat – just poofy! It is just the fur! I feel the same must be true for bumblebees – they are fluffy, but not really fat! And yes, these were the things going through my mind, when I created this geometric drawing: A…
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Ellipsoid Intersects Sphere – Digital Edition in Progress
I call my current series Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship for a reason: There is also Poinsot’s Pixel Spaceship in the making! Same physics, same idea! The motion of a force-free gyroscope can be described by an ellipsoid intersecting a sphere: The curve of intersection is the path the vector of angular momentum traces out – from…
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Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship #2 – Zeppelin: Unstable Rotation About the Intermediate Axis.
Subtitle: Why UFOs are more stable than zeppelins. This UFO… … tells a story of rotation. The yellow ellipsoid encapsulates the main features of a rotating rigid body: Its moments of inertia, that is: how masses are distributed in relation to three principal axes. The moment of inertia is larger, if more mass is positioned…
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Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship #1 – UFO
Louis Poinsot has a crater on the moon named after him … and now, also my series of geometrical drawings. I am taking the ellipsoid and sphere to the third dimension, based on the plan laid out before. Number 1 is an oblate ellipsoid, intersecting the sphere nearly in two circles. It is a classic…
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Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship #0 – The Plan
There was a time before computer-based three-dimensional visualization. There was a time before any software at all. When James Clark Maxwell sculpted thermodynamic functions with clay. When Louis Poinsot described the motion of the gyroscope in terms of three cones embracing each other, boiling down the essence of a free spinning top’s motion. Today, we…
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Circles to Circles (2025)
Allow for a repost of sorts! I am looking back, revisting my just completed series Circles to Circles! Here are just the images and the links to all the blog posts with more physics, mathematics, and (sometimes) poetry! Six differently positioned circles, six different points of view. An attempt at showing the beauty of math…
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Circles to Circles #4. Stereographic Retrospective.
Circles to Circles is a series of six geometric watercolor pencil drawings. I have revealed number one, two, and three, and this is number four: On this blog, I have probably said anything I had to say about stereographic projection … using words, mathematical symbols, and drawings. Today, I rather create a retrospective: This is…
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The Two Sides of Physics
Classical physics might not get its fair share of attention in contemporary science writing. But it can feel every bit as weird and awe-inspiring as so-called mysterious and spooky quantum mechanics! Statistical physics introduces you to spheres in trillions of dimensions whose volume is concentrated in a thin layer beneath their surfaces. Our intuition fails…
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Poinsot’s Gyroscope and the Magic of Precession.
Nobel prize winners have been fascinated by it: You can learn about the underlying mathematics. You can solve differential equations. But do you really feel why it does not fall? When gravity tries to topple a spinning top, the top escapes sideways, sort of, by precessing: The axis of rotation is changing slowly. There is…
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Stargate of Diffraction – Brought to Life!
When you look at a streetlamp through a finely woven curtain diffraction patterns are registered at the retina of your eye. When you look at the reflection of your reading light in your smartphone’s screen, diffraction happens. Instead of a sharp image, you see a kaleidoscopic multitude of rainbow-colored overlapping, blurry images. Each point of…