Art inspired by science

By Brian Clegg

Over the years I have come across a number of ways that art and science have come together effectively, often in a way that makes science more accessible. Sometimes this involves the explicit illustration of scientific principles, as in Adam Dant’s entertaining How it All Works, for which I had the pleasure of coming up with the scientific principles to be covered by his delightful illustrations (small version of one of Adam’s images alongside, but you have to see them full size to appreciate their genius).

I’ve recently come across a project by artist Lewis Andrews, who took a book a month for a year and used each as the inspiration for a series of artworks. Two of my books were included in the project: Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and Gravitational Waves.

You can see Lewis’s project Scientia in full on its web page. But I can reproduce two of the striking images here.

Halo IV

One of a series of digitally enhanced drawings inspired by Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Lewis: ‘The “Halo” series of digitally enhanced drawings touch upon the theorized properties of dark matter and its ability to hold galaxy clusters within a series of threads, filaments, and halo-like shapes. Zooming out, if you could visualize this architecture of our universe, it would appear to almost be a vast cosmic web.’

Kilonova IV

One of a series of Giclee prints on paper inspired by Gravitational Waves. Lewis: ‘Kilonova focuses on the death of two already dead stars. Neutron Stars are the left-over corpses of supergiant stars that went supernova. Neutron stars are, as a result, full of extremes. A sugar cube-sized piece of Neutron Star would weigh roughly a billion tons. Over time, Neutron Stars may stray too close to each other and begin a death spiral until they collide. When this happens, another massive explosion is generated called a Kilonova.’

I’ve always been wary of science-art collaborations as they can feel like a failed attempt to paste over the cracks of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures divide (see my article defending science fiction for some background on that). But sometimes they work well, and I think, each in their own very different way, this is true of both Adam and Lewis’s work.

Images © Lewis Andrews and Adam Dant

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.