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Physics World

Quantum of culture

Robert P Crease

Published Sep 1, 2008• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Its name is Quantum Cloud. Visitors to London cannot miss it when visiting the park next to the Millennium Dome or taking a cruise along the Thames. It rises 30 m above a platform on the banks of the river, and from a distance looks like a huge pile of steel wool. As you draw closer, you can make out the hazy, ghost-like shape of a human being in its centre. It is a sculpture, by the British artist Anthony Gormley, made from steel rods about a metre and a half long that are attached to each other in seemingly haphazard ways. Framed by the habitually grey London sky, it does indeed look cloud-like. But quantum?

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/21/09/26

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Its name is Quantum Cloud. Visitors to London cannot miss it when visiting the park next to the Millennium Dome or taking a cruise along the Thames. It rises 30 m above a platform on the banks of the river, and from a distance looks like a huge pile of steel wool. As you draw closer, you can make out the hazy, ghost-like shape of a human being in its centre. It is a sculpture, by the British artist Anthony Gormley, made from steel rods about a metre and a half long that are attached to each other in seemingly haphazard ways. Framed by the habitually grey London sky, it does indeed look cloud-like. But quantum?
The day I finished my schooling I said to a friend, 'That wasn’t an education that was an accumulation'. I felt at 18, that something vital was amiss in how society and culture were looking at life, and my education had been a reflection of that. So began a tortuous journey with the usual dead ends and “car crashes”. If it’s the travelling that matters not the arriving, an important point in my endless journey to make sense of my 37 years of life came in 1983 when I first encountered David Bohm. I had just started work as a physics teacher at Brockwood Park School where Bohm regularly visited to dialogue with the founder, J. Krishnamurti, and to talk to the school about his ideas on the processes of thought.
According to quantum physics, the world is fundamentally quite different than it seems. Drawing inspiration from the underlying nature of reality, former quantum physicist Julian Voss-Andreae created an image of a walking human as a quantum object. Made up of parallel sheets of steel, the sculpture is a metaphor for the counter-intuitive world of quantum physics. Symbolizing the dual nature of matter with the appearance of classical reality on the surface and cloudy quantum behavior underneath, the sculpture seems to consist of solid steel when seen from the front, but dissolves into almost nothing when seen from the side.
n 1959, when Charles Percy Snow lamented the gap between natural sciences and humanities in his lecture "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" 1 , it was followed by persistent debates about the two cultures and many responses that attempted to find a mediation.Some scholars were looking for a third culture that could provide the missing link.One of them is John Brockman, who in 1995, -40 years after Snow's lecture -, announced popular sciences (that were continuously growing over the last decades) as the crucial synthesis.2 This does not seem out of place, considering the mass of new books about the development of natural sciences in the 20th century, written in a commonly comprehensible manner, that are published annually and see their second edition as soon as the second year.Popular scientists like Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, John Gribbin and Paul Davies have long since been placed in the average home's bookcase and are definitely read by non-scientists.Meanwhile it is almost part of a successful career as a famous physicist to write a popular scientific book (which by the way is on no account a phenomenon of I
Art has the remarkable capacity to reveal things previously unrecognisable until they emerge visually, allowing us to accept new images and expand our ability to interpret the world. Such images become additions to the mental archive we use to recognise and understand our surroundings. Imagining something entirely new is, perhaps, altogether impossible insofar as our understanding is rooted in mental models we compare with external images. When it comes to quantum theory, for instance, we struggle to find any existing schema in our reliquary of mental images to draw from—with attempts to visualise quantum phenomena frequently creating only greater confusion as we try to make sense of its novel qualities within more traditional frameworks. An artwork expressing something unfamiliar about the world can challenge viewers to expand their canvas of consciousness, welcoming new possibilities. By attentively examining a work of art, we can sidestep preconceptions that might otherwise cast the unknown as alien. Art invites us to ask, “What sensations does this image offer me? What gift is it extending?”