Since my last posts I have had my 2nd meeting with Beth. I had initially talked about the possibility of using real dust in the kaleidoscope and having some kind of microscopic lens built into the kaleidoscope. Beth had some ideas about how to do this using glass balls. She had very kindly bought these and made a model for me. This involved putting a glass ball on the end of a cone and attaching this to a tube with a magnifying lens on the end of it.
We tried this out and it did work, but we felt the image you would get would not be clear enough or large enough. It would also add to much length to the kaleidoscope. We decided that using the photographic images that I had used previously, although just a representation of dust, would be stronger visually.
I had previously sent her a chapter of the Rovelli book, 'Seven brief Lessons on Physics.' The chapter was 'Probabilty, time and the heat of black holes.' As this is a book written for a popular audience and one that I had found useful in understanding more about time, I was keen to hear what she had to say about it. She said that it was pretty accurate overall, but that maybe Rovelli focussed on making it poetic, which sometimes compromised the physics. This is probably why I liked it! Her main contention with it was the there was no overlap with quantum physics, as this would have been very relevant to the chapter. This maybe because she read that chapter in isolation. Rovelli does talk about quantum theories in other chapters of the book. However, I'm sure that in simplifying the subject for a general audience some of the subtleties will be lost.
We also discussed what was happening in terms of physics in the pieces I am making. She explained some things about heat and the arrow of time. We discussed the fact that actually the reason we have a sense of the arrow of time is due to our human focus on what is visible. we decided she would write something to explain this further, that will be part of the booklet and website. I was really pleased as I thought this would be a great way of further clarifying the science behind the project and underlining what I had written about my artwork.
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