I've just begun another geometric painting, the second in my series for my upcoming show in November. It will be 20 inches square, and its composition is made from overlapping and underlapping squares or squarish rectangles in black, grey-blue, and one bright red square. There will be diagonal accents in brighter blue. Unlike my ocean painting, all the major lines in this painting will be straight. This means that I can use masking tape to make my edges nice and sharp. The title of this painting will be "Universe Detector." This, and the composition in general, is inspired by the particle detectors used at the great accelerators. Some physicists dare to say that other universes, or at least dimensions, might be discovered in such detectors as particles "disappear" after high-energy collisions.

But this is not a diagram of a particle detector, nor is it a direct depiction of a particle detector. I don't think they're square, but cylindrical. In fact, this picture follows the rather meretricious modern-artistic trend of making artworks on themes of modern physics, when the artist doesn't really know anything about modern physics other than what can be read in popular books on the subject.

I know a lot of artists, including ones who do art with "scientific" themes, and I sometimes ask them, how come you do art about science rather than doing science itself? And I often get the answer from the artist: Because I couldn't do the math. After all, that's my story, too, right? At least until five years ago. That's when I set out to prove, using my own experience, that a math-impaired artist could learn real i.e. mathematically based physics, rather than read equation-free books about it and do pretty science-inspired pictures.

Art is not physics. Physics is more difficult than art. The great asymmetry of the two fields proves it: many, many physicists can perform competently as musicians or artists, but few professional artists, if any, could do physics on the level of their corresponding physicist. After five years, I'm still only at a high school level, having had to educate myself in all the math that I failed to learn in my youth. I would like to be as good a physicist as Richard Feynman was as a bongo player—or an artist, because he could draw surprisingly well. But anyone, even a kid, can enjoy doing art or music. This is not true for mathematics and physics except for those annoying little geniusboys you read about in magazines.

So here I am then, doing what all the other well-intentioned artists who love science do: making a painting with a "scientific" inspiration and theme, which neither illuminates or conveys real science nor adds to the body of real scientific knowledge. I feel a kind of frustration about this, knowing that this is all I will ever get to do, that no matter how long I study or work on my physics, I will never actually contribute to the enterprise of science, not even an electron's worth. If I somehow decided to change careers and go into physics, I would have to be much younger, stronger, tougher, and more talented. And if I did, I would be so involved in its all-consuming work that I would no longer have the time to do art. This is a trade-off I am not willing to make. Therefore, as an artist on the fringe of science, everything I do is a symbol, not a reality.

Posted at 3:06 am | link