Live From the Big Bang:
Digital Pictures Made Directly From the Big Bang Radio Signal by Rick Doble
Copyright Š Rick Doble 2003. All rights reserved.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Forward Introduction Examples Of Biomorphic (ART) About These Images (SCIENCE) Art & Science Why Patterns? Harmony Of The Spheres Big Bang Picture Gallery Doble's Background Appendix
Foreword LIVE FROM THE BIG BANG These are real photographs that have been enhanced This work seeks to help bridge the gap between art and science as these pictures are a combination of both. These images were made directly from the radio waves created in the Big Bang. The Big Bang signals are the echo or afterglow of the single event that created the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, the planet Earth and ourselves. And while the Big Bang happened almost 14 billion years ago, these radio waves are happening now, this moment, everyday, and everywhere. They are ever present -- a signal from creation.
Introduction What could be more primal than the Big Bang that created the Universe? And what could be more elementary than simple hydrogen atoms -- one positive particle and one negative particle -- which were originally created in this explosion and which lead to the Universe today along with our solar system, our Earth and ourselves? This huge explosion is still with us today in the form of an echo -- the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation or CMBR or CMB. Everyday everywhere on the Earth this harmless radiation is with us. But more than that this 'radio signal' from our origins, our birth, can be received by manmade equipment and made visible using digital techniques.
I feel that at this fundamental point in our creation, art and science meet. Science found and revealed the CMBR which confirmed the Big Bang theory and whose discovery led to a Nobel Prize. Art has the ability to make the CMBR visible and accessible. By doing so, these images can provide a way of connecting people to their origins and also creating pictures that evoke a reverence for the miracle of life. The resulting images, photographs of static on a monitor, are organic. Rather than repeating and uniform like most static, the shapes are, instead, quite lifelike. And this is where science and art meet. Early in the 20th century several artists came up with the idea of biomorphism -- creating artistic shapes that were based on natural structures and natural processes. The imagery from the CMBR does just that. The shapes are not mathematical but a kind of 'primal soup', a squirming interconnected maze of in/out lines and forms that defy the imagination. They are fascinating at any enlargement.
Examples Of Biomorphic (ART)
Biomorphism is an art movement that began in the 20th century. It models artistic design elements on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature and living organisms. The Tate Gallery's online glossary article on biomorphic form specifies that while these forms are abstract, they "refer to, or evoke, living forms...". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomorphism In fine art, the term "Biomorphic Abstraction" describes the use of rounded abstract forms based on those found in nature. Also referred to as Organic Abstraction, this type of abstract art was not a school or movement, but a striking feature of the work of many different artists. visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/biomorphic-abstraction.htm
Artists who created in this manner include: Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi who were both sculptors and the architect Antoni GaudĂ. Here are some examples:
Jean Arp
Constantin Brancusi
Antoni GaudĂ (from his cathedral in Barcelona)
Enhanced Pictures From The CMBR Static Caused By The Big Bang
Enhanced Pictures From The CMBR Static Caused By The Big Bang
About These Images (SCIENCE)
As I have said, the radio signals received today that were produced by the Big Bang are technically defined as "cosmic microwave background radiation" or CMB or CMBR which is an "isotropic radiation bath that permeates the entire Universe" meaning that it is found everywhere in the Universe. While NASA uses satellites for its CMBR imagery, it is well established that ground based equipment can receive these signals. The problem then becomes how to separate the CMBR from manmade interference. With homemade optimized equipment it is reasonable to estimate that my raw images contain as much as 30% CMBR.
I created these images with a homemade receiver and a specially modified monitor that was designed to maximize the received radiation from the Big Bang and reduce man-made and Earth based interference. I plan to keep tweaking my equipment to improve the reception and to reduce the amount of Earth created noise. I am hoping that future work will feel even more organic. Stay tuned! I tweaked my original photographs by enhancing the color already embedded in the pixels. I occasionally further enhanced these images by adding "false colors" (a technique that NASA uses) with computer software and using other computer processes to bring out their beautiful and random structure. I did not, however, change anything in their structure.
Art & Science While science and art are often quite different, they just as often intersect. The CMBR radio waves are an example. The CMBR radio waves can be received as imagery or sound. Even scientists wax poetic when presented with the stunning reality of the CMBR -- it is as though the Universe itself were singing or talking. This is not a new idea but one that goes back hundreds of years and led to the the discovery of the how the planets moved -- by Kepler (see more below). So art, in the sense of aesthetics, i.e. song, harmony, is not a new idea or one that is far removed from science. In fact it may be central in some situations. Here are some comments about the sound aspect and a "harmony of the spheres." When The Universe Sang (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) The peaks [ED: in the CMBR] indicate harmonics in the sound waves that filled the early, dense universe. Until some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was so hot that matter and radiation were entangled in a kind of soup in which sound waves (pressure waves) could vibrate. The CMB is a relic of the moment when the universe had cooled enough so that photons could "decouple" from electrons, protons, and neutrons; then atoms formed and light went on its way. http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/cmb-harmonics.html
BBC NEWS By mapping tiniest temperature fluctuations in CMB, astronomers can "see" distribution of matter in early Universe. Using a music analogy, last year we could tell what note we were seeing - if it was C sharp or F flat." "Now, we see not just one, but three of these peaks and can tell not only which note is being played, but also what instrument is playing it - we can begin to hear in detail the music of creation." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1304666.stm
Primal Soup
"Primordial soup" is a term introduced by the Soviet biologist Alexander Oparin. In 1924, he proposed a theory of the origin of life on Earth through the transformation, during the gradual chemical evolution of molecules that contain carbon in the primordial soup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_soup
WHY PATTERNS? Life is made up of patterns from the blood cells in our veins, to traffic flow in a city, to cloud formations. All material is made up of microscopic patterns that show how that material is constructed and held together. And our lives over time are filled with patterns; from morning to evening we repeat and repeat day after day. Without these patterns life would not be possible. Artists tend to avoid patterns except as a background. Patterns are often seen as being merely decorative and not to be taken seriously. Part of the reason is that man-made patterns are not as interesting as natural patterns since they repeat in a more predictable manner. Artistically we do not often look directly at patterns in and of themselves. In this exhibit I am asking viewers to do just that.
Mark Tobey Tobey is most notable for his creation of so-called "white writing" - an overlay of white or light-colored calligraphic symbols on an abstract field which is often itself composed of thousands of small and interwoven brush strokes. This method, in turn, gave rise to the type of "all-over" painting style made most famous by Jackson Pollock, another American painter to whom Tobey is often compared. Tobey’s work is also defined as creating a vibratory space with the multiple degrees of mobility obtained by the Brownian movement of a light brush on a bottom with the dense tonalities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Tobey
Harmony Of The Spheres
A belief in a 'harmony of the spheres' was one that was quite old going back to ancient times and guided Kepler in his precise observations of planetary motion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis
While medieval philosophers spoke metaphorically of the "music of the spheres", Kepler discovered physical harmonies in planetary motion. He found that the difference between the maximum and minimum angular speeds of a planet in its orbit approximates a harmonic proportion. For instance, the maximum angular speed of the Earth as measured from the Sun varies by a semitone (a ratio of 16:15), from mi to fa, betweenaphelion and perihelion. Venus only varies by a tiny 25:24 interval (called a diesis in musical terms). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonices_Mundi
I grant you that no sounds are given forth, but I affirm . . .that the movements of the planets are modulated according to harmonic proportions.
-- Johannes Kepler, 1619 Kepler's insight led to a mathematical understanding of the planets' movements which in turn led to the insights of Isaac Newton whose insights in turn led to the creation of the modern world. When looked at closely, it is often hard to distinguish where art ends and science begins or vice-versa.
For nature is not merely present, but is implanted within things, distant from none; naught is distant from her... The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the universe... Giordano Bruno, Italian Philosopher d. 1600 (burned at the stake for his ideas)
First modern thinker to conceive of an infinite and relative Universe filled with many worlds.
"The trial of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition. Bronze relief by Ettore Ferrari (18451929), Campo de' Fiori, Rome." (commons.wikimedia.org)
Doble's Background After receiving my Master's Degree in Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the mid-seventies, I worked with a brilliant research doctor at UNC who, among other things, discovered a new blood cell. He taught me to "stain" images to bring out their structure. "Stain is the name of the game," he told me. This work here, from the Big Bang, came about, in part, because, using the idea of staining, I spent several years colorizing the microscopic black and white photographs of W.A. Bentley to bring out their structure. This work lead directly to these images where I took the idea of 'staining' to show structure, one step further. http://www.rickdoble.net/snow/ My snowflake pictures in turn were based on the work I had done in the late 1980s with the black and white images of human beings in motion by Eadweard Muybridge. His comprehensive landmark scientific study of Human and Animal Locomotion was made in the late 1800s. These images are now in the public domain. I selected, cropped, enlarged and then added color with a computer to a number of his photographs. This work has been exhibited at several museums and published as well. For this project I invented my own imaging system using the Radio Shack Color Computer. Personal Note: At the age of eleven I bought a telescope, made a model of the solar system for a school project and began to learn the constellations. When I was thirteen I read George Gamow's book One, Two, Three... Infinity and, as much as I could understand, read about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. In college I took a course in 20th century physics. I have done my best as a layman to keep up with the developments in astronomy since then.
APPENDIX NPR Interview with Rick Doble about this and other related work: Is Digital TV A Problem For Artist Inspired By Static? Interview on June 13, 2009 on All Things Considered, NPR (National Public Radio, USA) www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105371296 Student paper in the U.K. on Rick Doble's work with the Big Bang static: www.rickdoble.net/big_bang/Digital_Arts_Processes_ass2.html Proposal for a science/art project with Big Bang imagery: A Proposal for an Unrealized Art Project Rick Doble's web section devoted to this work: www.rickdoble.net/big_bang/index.html Doble's Resume: www.independent.academia.edu/RickDoble/CurriculumVitae