Art
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Physics for Fiction
I spent a few hours last week with a bunch of science fiction writers, giving them a tutorial on modern cosmology as part of the (first) “Physics for Fiction” workshop organized by my Imperial Astrophysics Colleague Dave Clements. The participants were some very big names in modern Science Fiction, and some hot up-and-coming writers, including…
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Infinite Jest
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It took me a few months, but I finally finished (the late) David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest. I enjoyed the writing, and found the stories of the main characters — Gately and Hal — affecting and moving, studies of sinking into and struggling out of various addictions. This was a writer, it seemed, who saw…
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Blast!
Although the big satellites get most of the press, a lot of astronomy is done from balloons, huge mylar bubbles that can carry a gondola up to about 120,000 feet over the earth — more than 22 miles or 32 km. That’s high enough that much of the atmospheric contamination is gone, but a lot…
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Cold War Modern
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I went to the excellent Cold War Modern exhibit at the V&A museum, a very specific take on what’s usually called in Britain the “postwar” period, concentrating on design and art from 1945 to 1970. Muscle-flexing propaganda from Moscow (and to a lesser extent from Washington), nuclear nightmares, the space race, the successful revolutions against…
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Serra’s steel
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Despite 100 years of abstract, conceptual, modernist art, it is surprising that Richard Serra’s sculpture works as miraculously well as it does. I went to see the (now-closed, alas) exhibition of his latest sculpture at London’s outpost of the Gagosian Gallery. For the last few decades, Serra has been taking great sheets of Cor-ten steel…
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Poetry and Space
I’ll be introducing this event tomorrow. Come on over for an evening of scientific poetry… (Apologies: most of the following links are broken.) Inua Ellams is one of the UK’s most talented performance poets. He is establishing a great reputation for the power and quality of his work. His live appearances have included the BBC…
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Puryear’s Ladder
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Here in New York for a collaboration meeting and, soon, Thanksgiving. Aside from old friends, fine food (and the exchange rates), a highlight was MOMA‘s Martin Puryear exhibit, and, particularly, “Ladder for Booker T. Washington”: Next up, the Auger observatory, cosmic rays, and the GZK Cutoff. And maybe Sesame Street and my new iPhone.
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Art, Science, Neutrinos
Andreas Gursky, arguably the most famous contemporary photographer (and inarguably the most well-remunerated one, after a recent $3 million sale) has a new show at London’s White Cube Mason’s Yard Gallery. Gursky creates large-scale pictures of various aspects of modern life — apartment buildings, agriculture, shopping. He digitally manipulates and combines individual photos to give…
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Sounds from the Tenement Museum
My favorite small museum is the Tenement Museum down in New York’s Lower East Side. It was built in the late 19th Century, housing a steady stream of immigrants until it was boarded up in the middle of the 20th. Different apartments in the building have been recreated as they might have been during different…
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How I will spend my winter vacation
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Maybe we should start a Cosmological Pynchon Book Club… And I’ve also got Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land if I make it through all 1000+ pages of this.
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