Artistic visualization is a tool common in physics, helping students, researchers, and professors grasp abstract and invisible concepts. The image makes each process more intuitive, and can communicate what isn’t obvious to the naked eye or by looking at an equation.
One of my inspirations for this project is Berenice Abbott, a photographer who worked with professors at MIT to capture physics phenomena on film. From projectile motion to magnetism, and collisions to light refraction through a prism, she created simple, yet masterful images to connect the equations in a textbook to what we can observe in the world through the “right lens”.
This project, called beautiful physics, exhibits several of Abbott’s images with descriptions written by Mount Holyoke physics students.
A second inspiration was the work of Paul Wainwright, an artist who built a pendulum in his shed, and with a technique called “light painting” captured the motion of its complex swing pattern.
Wainwright’s work inspired my technique of using light on the end of a pendulum to trace the path of photons and electrons.
My project focused specifically on high energy astrophysics processes, chosen because of their fundamentality to the field and and their current lack of qualitative representation. Synchrotron emission, Compton scattering, breaking radiation, and photon-photon pair creation are simple to explain visually, but they require extensive mathematical treatment to find quantitative results. They are essentially different ways that elementary particles and photons interact and form. These processes are building blocks to the larger systems that make up our universe. Therefore, by making animated visuals, we hope to garner a new appreciation and understanding of these processes in the public sphere. These animations could also be used as educational material in upper level physics courses.
As a student of physics, I know how important it is to have visuals to understand certain concepts. For two semesters, I was a Learning Assistant for an introductory mechanics course, where I became familiar with teaching and helping students understand the subject. The benefit to learning mechanics is that the equations describe motion that we can see in our daily lives. Real demonstrations of torque and drawings of potential energy helped students to solidify their understanding of how the math fit together with what they were seeing. Microscopic electrons and photons can’t be seen with the naked eye, so a simulation of their interactions is necessary for visualization purposes.
To recreate the motion of each particle, I used a photography technique called “light painting”. Light painting is the process of capturing the movement of light by keeping the shutter of a camera open for the duration of its travel. With this technique, I simulated the motion of a light wave, for example, by creating an apparatus that oscillated a small source of light back forth. Depending on the way I moved my camera, the oscillation turned into a sinusoidal pattern that mimicked the shape of a photon wave. I then used Photoshop and other editing tools to increase the image’s symmetry, add necessary effects, and layer images to create the full picture.
The realization of this project required strategic planning and creative problem solving. The task of creating animations with light painting has been done before, but usually by meticulously tracing each frame in separate images. Since electrons could be represented with a simple sphere, some of the animations were just a video of me moving the pendulum light or camera to mimic the path of the electron.
The lights I bought for the task are called “poi balls” usually used for dances and performances. They are intended for swinging and are durable enough to drop, which happened several times during the shoot.
This inspired the method for creating the breaking radiation animation.
The one thing that made this project different than ones I’ve done in the past was that it required a precise pattern that didn’t leave much room for artistic accidents. I also took video as well as still images in order to create moving animations.
The process of recreating high energy physical phenomena with photography was simple like the elements they were representing. I would first work with astrophysics professor Dr. Georganopoulos to determine how each physical process worked, then I would develop my own method for bringing it to life. An electron in a magnetic field became swinging the light in circles and walking forward at a constant speed. A photon’s wave pattern became a pendulum suspended from a tall bar, and the camera moving smoothly under it in the perpendicular direction to its motion. A straight electron path was a photograph of the light orb copied and pasted in a line using photoshop. Each element was then brought together into a timeline editor to show how they collide and form in each circumstance.
This project would not have been accomplished without the funding and support of
the UMBC Undergraduate Research Award
and
the National Science Foundation (NSF) AST 1714380
Our gratitude extends to the farthest reaches of the universe.
References
(1) Popova, Maria. “Berenice Abbott’s Stunning Vintage Black-and-White Photographs of Scientific Phenomena.” Brain Pickings, n.d., www.brainpickings.org/2012/12/03/berenice-abbott-documenting-science.
(2) Cade, D L. “Photographer Uses Giant Blackburn Pendulum to Create Abstract Large Format Light Paintings.” PetaPixel, 3 Oct. 2014, petapixel.com/2014/10/03/photographer-uses-giant-blackburn-pendulum-create-abstract-large-format-light-paintings/.