The  6 minute YouTube video, available in high def, provides a walking tour of my private Pop Science art collection. One painting spent a summer month in Lancaster, PA as part of a juried show. "Turquoise Einstein" was a hit with the public, but did not win "Best in Show" because it was too happy. Happy art is not serious art.

Most of these piece were created around 1995. Each piece was driven by equations I was pondering about in physics. The math is right, wrong or I don't understand it, but at least it looks good.



The big take home message I want people to get concerns patience. This art was created at a time when a different quaternion-free research effort had come to its end. I granted myself time to keep thinking about issues in physics. I didn't need to write a research paper or a grant by some deadline. I was advised to give up on the equation doodles, and instead to create a new theory, a means of doing many interrelated calculations. Such an absurd assignment, but I was stupid enough to take it seriously. That is the part that takes time. How much time is not clear.

In this community, a branch of my work was shot down in October by Henry and a small list of folks I compiled in a comment. I admitted defeat for the equations in question in November. So why do I continue? I am giving myself the time to find a useful variation should it exist. Three months is no time. I am focused on the gauge riddle simply because it is simplest. I had some hopes for games with automorphisms, but I came to agree the accounting looked too complicated. I even have a new candidate to try out. But I am not going to do that next week. I want to give the new effort more private time, see if it grows or wilts.

The next three weeks will be about old physics, the calculus of variations along with fun ways to become friends with hyperbolic functions. In the art world, people in museums spend 10 seconds on average looking at paintings. I like to look at a piece from a bunch of different angles. It takes so much time to see the beauty in art. I need to walk away from a piece, then circle around to see it anew. In the physics world, the GRE tests how many equations have been committed to memory to doodle a trivial amount of algebra quickly. I like revisiting deep ideas over an over. I enjoy revisiting special relativity because I do get to see things fresh, like Johannes Koelman's most excellent piece, "Velocity: Stuff That Just Doesn't Add Up". It is why I will do the bit on hyperbolic functions which used to scare the technical crap out of me, but no longer. Down with ratios (the stuff of sine and cosine), up with one side of the triangle at a time (hyperbolics).

Doug

Snarky puzzle. Take the gravitational escape velocity and drop it into the gamma of special relativity. Take the Taylor series expansion. Connect a dot to the Schwarzschild metric of general relativity. Give several reasons why this is "interesting, but not very interesting" (translation: don't take this exercise seriously since it has serious flaws. Seek and destroy.)

Next Monday/Tuesday: Deep into One D Euler-Lagrange