TEDxCaltech - Dennis Callahan - A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Artist
the scientist has an opportunity and I think it's a unique opportunity and that is to create novel works of art that no one else in the world can and one of the main points of my talk here is that these opportunities are being enabled by current and emerging forms of technology which are only going to grow and multiply in the coming 50 years also Technologies which are almost exclusively available scientists so on my first slide here uh we have two images One by world-renowned photographer anel Adams and another by one of the millions of unknown graduate students across the world and I put these images here for two reasons uh first is to Simply admire and compare their relative aesthetic quality despite their incredible differences in scale so even though their scale differs by about 10 orders of magnitude we can hopefully all agree there's some level of aesthetic value to each of them and depending on your preference you may even like the one on the right better now the second reason I put these images here is to think about how they were taken especially this one on the right this was taken with a scanning electron microscope probably a million dooll piece of equipment to which very few people in the world have access to now talented artists and photographers like anel Adams and many others didn't have and still don't have access to these kinds of Technologies but if they did don't you think they would see the value in images like these and preserve them as Timeless works of art but they don't have access to these Technologies we do scientists do so it is thus our responsibility as scientists to recognize and preserve these images as we have unique access to these hidden corners of our world um through the technologies that we use every day so where do we look as scientists for these images so the bottom is certainly a great place to start and as we all know there's plenty of room there not only for science but also for art I think now here I've compiled a number of microscope images at different scales all taken here at cowch by myself and many others uh we have some scanning electron microscope images like this one we have some very nice Optical microscope images as well as even a transmission electron microscope image now this she scope of this is just fascinating so consider the scale or the field of view of a given camera for example or even an artist's eyes for that matter and compare this with the scale of one of these microscopes so if you go through the numbers on average it's about 10 the seven times difference in scale which is 10 million times difference but we're talking about a two-dimensional image here so we have to square that scale and we get 10 the 14 so that's 100 million million times difference or 100 trillion times so that's what that means is for every photograph that's ever been taken there's a 100 million million times more area there to be explored in the micr structure that's an incredible number if that number was a number of images or a number of photographs there would be more photographs than have ever been taken in the history of the world combined so it's quite incredible so going through these with me hopefully you all agree that they're all quite beautiful and there's no reason I don't think why images like these should not be hanging on the walls of art museums across the world next to images of the world's macro structure in fact some of them have this image here by the rukus group at calch was actually on exhibit and is in the permanent collection of Moma at New York and a number of speakers in this session actually have been creating uh selling and exhibiting images like these for years and that's great it's really great but I think there should be a lot more of this given the scales that I just mentioned I think there should be a lot more of these images out there so another area where I think scientists can create unique art is through images obtained with um computer simulations and from graphical representation of complex data sets so here are put images first from computer simulations looking at the time evolution of the electromagnetic field through various Nano structures also some some very nice images from Caltech here looking at complex fluid dynamics as well as lastly an image in the middle right here from a data set which is looking at internet usage so these are all quite nice and I think it's important to note that none of these images could have been produced some 20 years ago they're all possible in some way through new technologies which are rapidly growing in use and in scope over the next years we're going to see a lot more people using these Technologies a lot more of these images being produced I just hope we can preserve the beautiful ones okay so what is my main point with all this as I'm sure you've gathered is that science can be beautiful but people need to recognize this scientists and non-scientists alike need to recognize this but it starts with the scientists and that's the important part scientists needs to be aware that this kind of value exists in their everyd work so that they can recognize these images and preserve them and they're not lost forever so I have a task for everybody watching um scientists or not if you work work with images the next time you're going through your data or looking through a microscope take a second to think if there's an image here that you could preserve strictly for visual appeal if there is I want you to capture it then I want you to email it to me I'll take good care of it I promise um okay so lastly I'd like to say that um I think it's not only artistic progress that can be made here but also um scientific progress so one of the main ideas that was thrown around at that moment exhibit I just mentioned is that often when you're designing some kind of scientific device or system usually the designs that are the most aesthetically pleasing are the ones that tend to work the best and I think this is true in fact when Waton and Crick were looking for the structure of DNA they built these 3D models and to help themselves visualize it and when they came across this beautiful double helix it looked so nice to them they just sort of knew it had to be right so in closing I'd like to say that I think that uh the spirit and the Curiosity of Richard feeman demand us all as scientists to explore these hidden corners of our world recognize all of the value that is there to preserve it and to make it accessible to the rest of the world thank you