In the history of science, images and words have dominated the way concepts are conveyed to colleagues, students, and the public. Books, prints, photographs, graphs, and diagrams have been the easiest way to portray profound ideas in scientific disciplines for centuries.
What can often fall by the wayside in science education is how things move. In science we see dazzling images of swirling galaxies, intricate cells, and dashing animals, but it is very hard to get a sense of the real motion of these objects. What causes different types of motion? Why do objects move the way they do? Why do some movements seem graceful while others appear clunky? And most importantly, rather than conceptualizing the motion of an object, how does the motion relate to our own bodies?
Artist Anne Lilly builds exquisite stainless steel sculptures that directly explore these issues of motion. The pieces created by the Boston-based artist (and friend of Arthur Ganson) are propelled by the viewer's hand, giving a direct cause and effect experience for each viewer. Once set in motion, Lilly's sculptures demonstrate how beautiful and simple motion can arise from simple rules of physics and mechanics. While Newton's laws describe how objects move, Lilly's sculptures describe how these motions can appear to a human observer. In her piece Parietals (see a video here), Lilly uses conservation of angular momentum to beautifully transform steel rods into both a science demonstration as well as a mesmerizing display of pure, graceful motion. By presenting a graceful motion in such a simple way, the artist allows the viewer to contemplate each moment of cause and effect that causes the motion.
Because the motion in Lilly's sculptures is so simple and so pure, it is not hard to relate it to motion found in nature. In her recent series of spinning steel rod pieces, specifically "There's a Certain Slant of Light", "Polaris", and "Parting" (click each to see a video), the motion of emergent flocking is suggested, such as the mesmerizing movement of starling flocks (also see Richard Barnes' photographs of the same subject). The long, thin rods in Lilly's sculptures appear to move independently one moment, and then form a coherent motion the next. They expand and contract, cohere and dissolve, much like many forms of natural flocking.
On another level, the same series of sculptures call to mind electrons swirling around an atomic nucleus. Lilly's pieces are specifically geared so that none of the rods will ever touch another, which strongly parallels the Pauli exclusion principle forbidding any two electrons from simultaneously occupying the same quantum state. In quantum theory, the enormous empty space surrounding an atomic nucleus is filled by a cloud of electrons that never "touch". While the exact paths of the electrons can never be known (see the Heisenberg uncertaintly principle), the regions that they are most likely to be found can form very interesting geometric shapes. Lilly's sculptures seem to provide an impossible view of how electrons would move through their probability regions if we could actually follow their individual motions. Always surrounding an invisible nucleus, they never touch, sometimes appear random, but nonetheless form coherent patterns from simple underlying principles. Form is created not by objects or images, but by pure motion itself.
All images and videos are from Anne Lilly's personal website, and the Arden Gallery website.
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