The days are longer, but it's still the dead of winter. It's cold and snowy. I am still doing the most basic and elementary physics; I just did my end of chapter review about acceleration and vectors and gravity and orbits. I think my physics and math studies are orbits and not straight-line acceleration. I think sometimes I am just going around in circles. I never knew the formulas for acceleration going around in a circle before. I feel as though I have to apologize to my scientific readers. To them, this must look sort of like an illiterate over the age of 50 trying to learn how to read. When I read all this exciting stuff about dark energy and black holes and neutrinos and quarks and string theory, etc. I sometimes feel I should stop. I shouldn't tempt myself by wanting to learn about anything except the beginning material I have at hand. I must somehow earn my way to a real appreciation of string theory, dark matter, other universes, etc. by clawing myself up the wall of physics, bit by bit. Until then, I shouldn't look up, and maybe not even read anything more, at least for now, from those scientific weblogs. I have 23 problems about acceleration to do next.

I am just about to finish "Project 911" and when I do you will see it through the marvel of the Internet, which was made by people who managed to get beyond first semester physics. The question has arisen as to whether "Project 911" is SERIOUS art. It is possible that nothing I do could be legitimately called "serious" art, simply because I am the one doing it and I have an inadequate, or shallow, or commercialized conception of art. If that is true, then I will let you, the viewers, be the judges of whether 911 is "serious" art. There are a lot of artists who don't even concern themselves with "seriousness," but then, they may not be serious themselves.

At one point long ago, someone told me that I should only paint "recognizable" satellites, spacecraft, and cosmic subject matter when I was doing space art. I should paint pictures of The Orion Nebula, for instance, or other sky wonders shown to us by the Hubble Telescope. I am not sure why this person suggested that, other than a misguided desire to see me sell pictures or perhaps just a lack of imagination. I never took that advice, since in my opinion the Hubble photos speak for themselves and need no artistic imitation. Many years later I mentioned this to a Friendly Astrophysicist, who actually works with the Hubble telescope. Could I, uh, "make up" nebula or galaxy scenes which were not actually documented by Hubble or other telescopes? This seems a rather silly question in retrospect, but the Astrophysicist replied sincerely. The gist of the answer was: It's a big universe. There are countless nebulae and countless galaxies. Anything you could make up probably looks like something in some remote galaxy. We and our instruments will never see it, but we can assume that it is out there somewhere, orbiting in the black winter of distant space.

Posted at 2:14 am | link