What is Cymatics?

Cymatics is the science of visualizing audio frequencies. Thanks to some very interesting experiments and their filming by this duo, Nigel Stanford and Shahir Daud, you can enjoy this truly audio-visual experience.

For example in one of the experiments called Ruben's Tube, a metal tube is filled with an inflammable gas. Different audio frequencies form pressure waves in this gas, so if you play different tones, you will get different numbers and heights of flames.

The tube is attached to a speaker, so the synchronized visual looks like a "Performance by the Flames".











You could watch this performance at :
http://nigelstanford.com/Cymatics/Rubens_Tube

Dan Shechtman's crystals

Dan Shechtman, the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011, for his work on quasi-crystals. What is interesting is that for a long time, the scientific community could not accept the possibility of non-periodic or quasi-periodic crystals. Linus Pauling is even noted as saying, "There is no such thing as quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists."

The atoms in Shechtman's crystals, an alloy made up chiefly of aluminium and manganese, exhibited a ten-fold symmetry, hitherto deemed impossible in nature. Shechtman could rotate the diffraction pattern he was seeing, by a tenth of a full circle, i.e. 36 degrees, and still obtain the same pattern. The answers came from from the world of art, and mathematics.

Aperiodic patterns have been used in medieval Islamic patterns, with a set of repeating tiles. Known as "Girih" patterns, using two to five unique tiles, they have been used to decorate portals and vaults of shrines for long:

Pattern from the archway in the Darb-i Iman shrine in Iran

The mathematical explanations came later.     Roger Penrose created aperiodic mosaics, with just two unique tiles: a fat and a thin rhombus. Substituting circles representing atoms, in Penrose's mosaic, and using this pattern as a diffraction grating, produced the same ten fold symmetry that Shechtman was seeing: ten bright dots in a circle.

The repeating structures in Shechtman's quasi-crystals

The Islamic artisans were obviously using advanced concepts of quasi-crystal geometry. In an interesting case of science-following-art, the patterns obtained by Shechtman look no different!

Quasi-crystals have since also been found to exist naturally.







Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Shechtman
http://www.themuslimtimes.org/2011/07/photography-2/london-museum-hosts-contemporary-islamic-art-show
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1543585/Islamic-tilers-may-have-led-scientific-field.html

Living bridges of Cherrapunji

I was so amazed to hear about these self growing, self supporting bridges about Cherrapunji. My knowledge about Cherrapunji was that it was the wettest place on earth, which I learnt in school as part of "general knowledge" about things. I did not know a thing about how people manage their lives in the "wettest place" on earth.

One had never wondered about how the local people navigate their way around rivers, and hillsides. Well, they apparently use natural rubber trees along river banks in an ingenuous way, to make "living bridges"!





The local rubber trees give out lateral roots, which are made to grow in the direction you want, say across a river. How are they guided along? Well, one way is to use old betel nut tree trunks, hollowed out, and sliced in the middle, to act as guides, around which the rubber tree roots entwine themselves, and grow. Bridges have been grown like this by the local people, which are more than a hundred feet long, and can hold more than fifty people at a time. When the roots reach where they are supposed to, like say the other side of the river, they are allowed to take root.

 The root-bridges keep growing and nurturing and maintaining themselves. Some of the bridges made this way, and in use even today are more than 500 years old.

Bamboo sticks may also be used to provide the initial framework. Though the bamboo sticks rot over time, the rubber tendrils harden before that, and take over.

What happens when a bridge is wearing out?
You have to start building another one, using new roots, and other trees. It takes 12-15 years for the tendrils to harden, and for the tree roots of a new bridge to become strong and hard enough to start bearing weight.

Villagers knot up some of the thin, aerial roots to form steps and ladders and make it easier to use the bridge. Another ingenuous step! Such ladders are also made along steep hillsides and forests, to be able to navigate along the land better.

Hope this knowledge and practice of Cherrapunji gets appreciated and protected.

Maybe such rubber trees and bridges can even be grown in other rain soaked places, adding a touch of mystery and magic to those places.

http://inhabitat.com/extraordinary-living-bridges-are-made-of-growing-roots-and-vines/

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2014/08/meghalaya-the-wettest-place-on-earth/100797/

Turing and the Zebra

Zebra stripes have always seemed stunning and wonderful and majestic. Now, Alan Turing's work done  on patterns of diffusion in 1952 is explaining the evolution of a zebra's stripes.

Apparently, when chemicals diffuse across an array of cells and interact with each other, the differences in chemical concentrations lead to a further differentiation in the spreading of the chemicals.

If there are two kinds of chemicals, let us say, and activator and an inhibitor, mixing across an array of cells, there is another level of complexity added, and a pattern of diffusion gets created. Using differential equations for this reaction-diffusion process, Turing predicted six kinds of patterns that would be formed. And one of them is zebra stripes! The results for the patterns predicted have got validated in a lab setting, and been published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences recently.

The magnificent stripes have another benefit for zebras. Apparently, they deter parasitic flies. Both tsetse flies and horse flies, which are capable of draining a significant amount of blood, and are vectors for several fatal diseases, seem to have an aversion for stripes, and prefer to alight on all-black or all-white surfaces.

( http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/turings-thesis-on-morphogenesis-validated/article5863644.ece

http://www.theguardian.com/science/animal-magic/2014/apr/02/why-do-zebras-have-stripes-scientists-have-the-answer )

Fractal fringes and weaving webs

Found some fine examples of maths-inspired-art in this article. I am sharing here the two I liked most. Both of them have endless possibilities...

The fractal fringes in this composition were made using Photoshop and Mathematica.

This composition, called "Touch-graph" visualizes a computer program used to show connections between people, creating a web of connections, much like thread-work. Different colours symbolize different kinds of connections.

http://discovermagazine.com/mathart#.UyM4ElFdVuw

You can hear colours!

Turns out you can hear colours!

Neil Harbisson is a colour blind artist, who can see only in black and white. He has been wearing an external "electronic eye" for a decade. The electronic eye or "eyeborg", had a camera on one side, and audio implant on the other side. The camera would pick up colour frequencies, and convert them into distinct sounds for Neil to hear. 

According to Neil Harbisson, every colour has a different vibration, and over time, he got used to all the "notes" for various colours, and knew them without having to consciously think of them. He says he had even started dreaming in colour.

About a year ago, Harbisson found a doctor, and an anaplastologist, a specialist in prosthetics, who worked together to implant a chip inside his skull, that allowed him to "see" more intricate colours through bone vibrations. A wi-fi connector inside the chip even allows Neil to hear images sent from a mobile phone. So now the possibilities have suddenly opened up....he may be able to hear colours from different locations and even switch between live streams!




http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/10701562/Colour-blind-artist-unveils-worlds-first-eyeborg-device.html

Tattoos create music

A tattoo artist has apparently created tattoos that make music. The project called "Reading my body" was created by Russian visual artist Dmitry Morozov. Robotic sensors that across the tattoo, and could be controlled manually as well, "read" it like sheet music.

http://www.cnet.com.au/instrument-reads-tattoos-as-sheet-music-339346901.htm

One can think of so many possibilities already....could music be similarly be converted into tattoos/ line drawings? 
And can paintings be converted into their musical interpretations?

Picture of Pi!

This would be interesting to try out!

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/08/start/spot-a-shape-and-reinvent-maths

Apparently, this is an image generated by "going for a random walk", that is drawing a path described by a sequence of digits in a random number, in this case Pi.
Would be interesting to try out, with different numbers, or as per the artists's fancy!