Instrument of Thought: A Meditation on Matter and Light by LisaPettiboneartist

Instrument of Thought A Meditation on Matter and Light

Lisa Pettibone

Instrument of Thought A Meditation on Matter and Light

An installation by Lisa Pettibone

I make things with materials and then hold them up to the light, thinking ‘it is good’ or ‘it is not good enough’. The materials guide my ideas and bear the brunt of my thoughts – ‘how can I manipulate you to speak for me in the world?’ Light informs shape and shadows indicate depth. But I treat the quality of light as a material: bouncing off form, refracting from glass, amplifying contours and filling sensory space. Matter and light are an infinite part of my work as I work through my particular perception of the world. Science has mapped the mechanics of matter from the cosmic to the quantum, giving us behind-the-scenes clues to the fundamental, observable behaviour of every aspect of ourselves and the world beyond our skin. In the last several hundred years, we have leapt from one seismic shift in understanding to another, thus altering the public perception of reality along the way. Science understands before the public but eventually concepts become common knowledge: Newton offered experiments revealing the colour composition of white light; Einstein told us that our clockwork universe is not perfectly fixed but instead ‘relative’, while making the speed of light a universal measure; black holes are puckers of black nothingness devoid of light; Bohr explained that an atom’s electron is precisely somewhere around the nucleus. The list goes on – we try to keep up. Instrument of Thought is an art installation created to philosophically consider these shifts by crafting a device not to observe and record but to ponder what these startling concepts might mean to humanity. Or perhaps less dramatically, as dishes get washed and dogs are walked, we can make time for the wondrous mental puzzles they offer. Through movement, materials and sound, these elements together form a whimsical narrative where each part must be considered from the relative direction of the others, creating an alternative view of a strange cosmos.

And there is no such thing as unextraordinary light, ordinary matter. Simon Barraclough, poem for the Euclid Mission

Light Isaac Newton didn’t try explain what light was made of, instead he set out to meticulously examine how it functioned: white light can be split into seven colours that refract at different angles. Published by the Royal Society in 1704, his treatise ‘Opticks’ studied the varioius phenomena of light refraction. Rainbows and disco balls come to mind. Although undoubtedly struck by the intense beauty of his experiments, Newton’s tidy mind was better suited to creating the scientific method (testing hypothesis through observation) which has since shaped modern science.

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Measurement is king in science, so when Einstein told us that the speed of light doesn’t change, even if the source is accelerating, a much-needed constant was found to map the vastness of space. How do we measure light – beauty or speed? How has something so ephemeral become something so definitive?

When he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Image: NASA ISS, sunrise bursts through a green aurora

Light is life. Liliane Lijn, artist

Photosynthesis is nature’s way of making food from light, so it’s possible to say we are made from light. We measure light with our own bodies by gathering its rays during the day in our eyes and skin to make melatonin. Then when it wanes, we shut down to rest until the sun rises again having measured it in sleep.

Between light and matter Physicists put the properties of matter and light in their boxes – matter refers to the physical objects in the universe and light is energy in the form of waves. Then, in the early 20th century, physicists began to see that light could also act like a particle in some instances and matter too could act like a wave. The infamous Double Slit experiment proves a strange paradox called wave-particle duality and began a debate at the heart of quantum physics. The human experience of matter and light is unified – we perceive these things simultaneously. Someday the theories will be unified too, and in the meantime we are thankfully left with sunsets and shimmering water.

Matter

Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things; a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippy works of the 60s. Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

While we go about our business each day, we unknowingly encounter tiny cosmic particles that have filtered down through the atmosphere. Breaking away from high energy atoms hurled toward the planet from the sun or deep space, they are also called cosmic rays. Some are moving so fast and are so small that they rarely interact with matter on earth. For example, every second billions of neutrinos pass through our bodies without a trace. The cosmos isn’t out there waiting for discovery, it’s with us everyday. The brass rods gently tapping on Instrument of Thought are a sonic reminder of these invisible particles that connect us to the universe. The guilded dots on the glass are a reminder of the stars that created our most covetted material.

What would we do without gravity? A result of matter, it shapes everything we know and then holds it all in place. This same thought occurred to Newton as he famously idled under an apple tree during the London plague: the Moon and the falling fruit were affected by the same force. By the late 1600’s, Newton’s laws of gravitation were established and concepts about the interaction of this force changed our perception of the simplest acts, such as skipping rope or watching water droplets leave garden stems. Beauty and danger were everywhere.

In the late 19th Century, JJ Thompson discovered the existence of the electron, a negatively charged particle integral to each atom – atoms were no longer the smallest unit known to man. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford refined the model of the atom, stating that it consisted mostly of empty space with a tiny nucleus. Neils Bohr went further and proposed that electrons orbited the atom but the precise location of the electron was a mystery. Quantum mechanics studied this conundrum. In 1926, Shrodinger stated, through mathematics, that electrons existed in ‘probable’ cloud-like region around the atom – calling it an electron cloud. Heisenberg called it the ‘uncertainty principal’, prompting philosophical discussions about reality – is something really there if we can’t measure it?

The concept of empty space interests me: we live in a world full of voids. Yet in these spaces (where our eyes fail), are numerous fields lighter than matter, trembling in a cosmic soup. Apparently there is roughly one proton (atomic nucleus) per cubic metre in the vacuum of space, rising to six protons if we include dark matter, making the universe 99.9% vacant. Here on earth, we live in an intensely matter rich environment where one small rock has billions of atoms clinging together, fitting nicely in a wet hand after being pounded by the sea. Lucky us.

Image top right: NASA Event Horizon Telescope

Everyone knows what a black hole is. It’s where all your spare cash goes or the mysterious location of your lost house keys. Now part of popular lexicon serving as a useful metaphor for oblivion, the term black hole refers to a infintely dense area of spacetime where nothing can escape, not even light. The darkest place in the cosmos, they are formed when a massive star collapses at the end of its life – gravity run amok. Predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, it is a scientific anomaly that was eventually photographed in 2019 by NASA’s Event Horizon Telescope, revealing a doughnut of hot gas around an area of extreme nothingness. Though hard to fathom, the concept nevertheless provided a good excuse to use the blackest black paint (Culture Hustle’s BLK3) on the back of a curved mirror… light and dark coexisting.

Background image: Cyanotype print produced with Eddington’s 1919 photo of the solar elclipse, courtesy of the Royal Astronomical Society

In 1915, Einstein published his general theory of relativity, stating that what we perceive as gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of what he called ‘space time’. During the solar eclipse of 1919, photographs taken by Arthur Eddington on the West African Island of Principe confirmed his theory that light from distant stars would shift in position as it bent around the sun’s massive gravity. Gravity, space and time are the same thing – our senses can cope with the first aspect but fail miserably with the others. It’s fortunate that artists have imagination and scientists have mathematics.

The concept of matter is challenged by its rival ‘dark matter’ an invisible, structural web of matter threading through the universe. We are asked to imagine solidity without the contours of light and shadow to define its shape. More alarming is that this non-luminous matter makes up 27% of the universe, dark energy taking up 68% which leaves only 5% for the matter we know and love – babies, animals, trees, rocks, planets and stars. It appears that most of the universe was not meant to be seen, heard or touched by humans – we are an exquisite anomaly.

Image: NASA Chandra X-Ray Telescope

Filaments of dark matter provide the skeleton of the universe, around which galaxies cluster and stars ignite.

Physicist John Ellis, CERN/Kings College London

Image: Richard Massey, Durham University

Scientists have discovered what they believe to be halos of dark matter, with ten times the mass of normal matter, herding the hot gases and dust needed to form the galaxies within them. Richard Massey at Durham University methodically plotted their form and structure – dark matter has shape! These lines are the inspiration behind the white glass forms in Instrument of Thought, a kind of negative rendition of this womb-like force that nurtures the galaxies that holds the star we call the Sun.

Instrument of Thought: A Meditation on Matter and Light, 2022