Tag: Science
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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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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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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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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 Dancing Cones
I have always loved the physics of the gyroscope. There are so many different mathematical / conceptual / geometrical ways to capture the same thing. Lots of interesting ellipsoids and cones are waiting to be drawn! Here, I am visualizing the motion of a gyroscope free of external forces, involving three cones, following Louis Poinsot.…
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Celebration of Diffraction
It has been a while since elkement’s diffraction art has been presented to the world the first time ever. It was you, netizens(*) of the blogosphere(*), who saw it first – three years ago!(*) This is is internet dinosaur jargon This is the original Ribbon of Diffraction: Each image shows the same virtual sculpture from…
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Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Nostalgia Overload.
The cosmos is all there is, ever was, and ever will be. So he says, standing at the metaphorical shores of the cosmos in episode 1 – The Shores of the Cosmos. All episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos are available on the Internet Archive. I hope I can trust them to have sorted out the…
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Frozen Harmonics – on Canvas!
Last Friday, I got my haul from the print shop! I had my mathematical artwork Frozen Harmonics printed on canvas, and I absolutely like the result! My “product photography” has room for improvement, but the colors and the black background really look way more vibrant / saturated than I expected. The black looks perhaps even…
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Sparse Spectral Spaceport: Alpha
The Sparse Spaceport series captures the essence of what I am trying to do with code art inspired by physics: ~ I want to convey the beauty of a phenomenon in physics – the diffraction of white light into rainbow colors, but (optionally) also the beauty of the underlying math. ~ I want to reconnect…
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Orbital Autumn
My code art had turned dark during the pandemic. I enjoy seeing my futuristic space stations floating in the dark. But it is autumn now – time of soft warm colors. The soft, rounded shapes of my spherical harmonic functions would match autumnal colors perfectly! This is my starting point: Alien structures on black. I…
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Inverted Atoll
I am applying my quadrant scheme to inverted diffraction art – looking at the same virtual, three-dimensional structure from four different viewing angles! This ‘atoll’ is built from mathematically exact diffraction curves – wavy lines, mounted on a circle! I am creating diffraction art with javascript, based on the framework threejs, no AI image generator…
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Combining Everything
The site name of this blog once was: Theory and Practice of Trying to Combine Just Anything. Should I bring it back? This website has truly been all over the place. History of heat pumps. Found Poetry from spam comments. Mathematical proofs. Drawings. Thinking about life-changing decisions. The original tagline – created in 2012 –…
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Lissajous Quadrupole. Joys of the Early Web.
In the old days you did not blog or post but fiddled with HTML tags on the text files making up your weird personal website. You could not fathom that somebody else would enter your personal space on the web and leave a “comment”. Occasionally, you received an e-mail related to your website, or a…
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Lissajous Trilogy 123
It is a humble pencil drawing. Created slowly, using traditional paper, pencil, ruler, and compass. Following the principles of descriptive geometry. No need to install something. No need to debug why version x of a tool does not play nicely with operating system y. All the code, all the documentation, all the steps of your…
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Sparse Spectral Spaceport: Psi Psi Star
I could say, I am just numbering the artworks in this series by using Greek letters. So this one is item Psi! But I have created a sparse spaceport from diffraction curves in spectral colors. It is not a single Psi, but rather a Psi Psi Star … … the absolute square of the wave…
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Pushing Forward Poetry: You Feel What Tangent Vectors Do!
On this blog, I had often been chewing on a piece of mathematical physics, saying the same thing over and over again, with math, without math, in different ways, deriving A from B and back. Re-developing well-known science, making it mine. Everybody remembers the spheres in trillions of dimensions, right? I am not sure who…
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I am Still Not Connecting the Dots! In a Negative Way!
Welcome again to my dot matrix dreamscape! Once upon a time I was debugging the code behind my creations. To spare the cycles of my hardworking graphics processor, I did not draw my diffraction curves as curves. I did not connect the dots! To my surprise, I liked the result! The point (pun intended) of…