World in the Balance: The historic quest for an absolute system of measurement by Robert P. Crease

PRECISION and fastidiousness – at first blush the quest for a precise system of measurement might seem a plodding pursuit. But as philosopher Robert P. Crease makes clear in World in the Balance, it was anything but.

From prehistory to the present, Crease ties humanity’s search for precision to the history of nations and of ideas. Any measurement must be based on a “standard” that embodies a unit, such as a foot, a finger or a hand. Eventually standards came to be inscribed in stone or metal and stored in protected areas such as the Acropolis for the Greeks, and in later centuries in Paris and Washington DC. Ownership of the standard symbolised political and social power.

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Published in New Scientist on Dec 3, 2011

Escape artists: Breaking out of the lab

By Tiffany O’Callaghan, CultureLab editor

New Scientist – CultureLab – 12 July, 2011

Art & Science: Merging Art & Science to Make a Revolutionary New Art Movement

[...] Curated by historian of science and author Arthur Miller, the show is meant to explore the meaning, and boundaries, of bio-art – the way that “artists are taking science out of the lab,” Miller says.

A perfect example of this is the multimedia projection, Imagine Tree, by the artists Ken and Julia Yonetani which uses electron microscopy to capture photosynthesis and respiration of leaves. The artists have augmented the footage, which zooms in to an astonishingly minute level, with audio of sighs and hisses, and visual bursts of what appears to be steam, creating the sensation that the leaves are breathing. Yet just as you come to envision the gasping pores as tiny mouths, they begin to blink, and slowly morph into eerie eyes that grow in size as the artists zoom out. [...]

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Artifice that shapes our ends

By Matthew Reisz

Times Higher Education – The Pick – 7 July, 2011

Art & Science: Merging Art & Science to Make a Revolutionary New Art Movement

Davide Angheleddu’s corroded bronze sculptures transform the illustrations of plankton taken from a 1904 book by the German philosopher and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, Art Forms of Nature, into a totally different medium. Strangely beautiful, they stand on the frontier between the industrial and the organic – a frontier increasingly blurred by technology, and where many of our deepest anxieties and ethical challenges lurk. This exhibition (from 8 July to 24 September) offers a series of frequently disturbing reports on what artists have found there.

There is nothing particularly new about artists being inspired by science, as curator Arthur I. Miller, emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London, reminds us in the exhibition catalogue. Picasso was interested in X-rays, Dali in relativity and quantum physics. Yet today’s artists who go into the lab to collaborate with biologists have some fascinating new media with which to work. [...]

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Art & Science: Merging Art & Science to Make a Revolutionary New Art Movement

Exhibition at GV Art Gallery, London

8 July – 24 September 2011

Click here to download exhibition e-Catalogue in PDF format

Merging Art & Science

Science is changing our world and our lives at an ever-increasing rate. But today artists are bringing science out of the laboratory. Nowhere is this more evident than in biology-inspired art which, by its very nature, necessitates collaboration between an artist and a scientist. This is the theme of the exhibition Merging Art & Science.

Once art and science seemed diametrically opposite; but these days some of the most innovative artists are fusing art and science to create a brand new art movement inspired by science. Striving to visualise the invisible and what it will mean to be human in the future, they create images and objects of stunning beauty, redefining the notion of ‘aesthetic’ and of what is meant by art.

Artists and scientists have always tried to fathom the reality beyond appearances, but it was really only with Isaac Newton, and the onset of the Age of Rationalism in the 17th century, that a distinction was made between the two. In the centuries that followed, science and technology were seen as the real pursuit of truth, while art — which had the role of representing people and landscape — seemed like mere entertainment. With the onset of the avant-garde, and of modernity, the two began to merge with greater and greater intensity. [...]

Click here to read full essay or download e-Catalogue below:

A scientist, not a cartoon

Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science by Lawrence Krauss

Since his death in 1988, Richard Feynman has become something of an industry. In addition to several biographies, there are published collections of Feynman’s essays and lectures, including just about every scrap of paper he ever scribbled on. Much of this presents an image of the man as bongo drummer, player of practical jokes and major-league womanizer, who somehow turned out groundbreaking science in his spare time. But let’s face it: when it comes to Feynman’s personal life, we really do not know what to believe. Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman’s long-time colleague at the California Institute of Technology, once famously grumbled that Feynman “spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself”. Most of his adventures do little, if anything, to illuminate Feynman the physicist.

In Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, the scientist, science writer and eminent spokesman for science Lawrence Krauss focuses on Feynman’s research, thus providing a much-needed corrective to this caricature. What emerges is a portrait of a man who worked long hours to understand physics. Physics was Feynman’s heart and soul, and Krauss has done a superb job of showing this in his book, taking us through Feynman’s oeuvre as if teaching a masterclass. [...]

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Published in Physics World on Jun 2, 2011

Click the play button below to listen to Technology’s Impact On The Modern World by Professor Arthur Miller, an interview on Henry Scott-Irvine Presents on Resonance.fm.

Art and science: bonded by creativity

If you were asked to define creativity, what would you say? The chances are that your definition will vary with others – many others. There is no instruction manual. While the creation of certain products may follow a ruleset, this process isn’t creativity per se.

So, creativity is perhaps more concerned with a realisation of something intangible: turning loosely-formed but clearly-visualised ideas into something that is truly groundbreaking. By this broader definition, creativity not just informs artists to produce spectacular results, but also scientists, given that the common quest for artists and scientists is to effectively visualise the invisible.

Arthur Miller’s work focuses on the cognitive processes and powers of visualisation that enable the boldest and most powerful creators to see a world which exists beyond sense perception, where there resides objective truth. [...]

Read full article at Imperica.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLEpG7W5fGc

In a BBC News Special ‘Japan: The Catastrophe’, Humphrey Hawksley reports on Japan’s worst crisis since the Second World War, and looks at the implications for the future.

Arthur I Miller comments on the nuclear part of the situation.

Stranger than fiction

Arthur I. Miller in conversation with Abha Dawesar at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2011.
Presented by ICCR

Watch session video below:

D5DH 01-(94) from Dreamcast.in on Vimeo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_QoEUmwVPU

Artist and writer Matt Collings takes the plunge into an alien world of equations. He asks top scientists to help him understand five of the most famous equations in science, talks to Stephen Hawking about his equation for black holes and comes face to face with a particle of anti-matter.

Along the way he discovers why Newton was right about those falling apples and how to make sense of E=mc2. As he gets to grips with these equations he wonders whether the concept of artistic beauty has any relevance to the world of physics.

Click here to watch full episode again online