Plus that colored smoke link that Amara posted was very lovely indeed.

There has been lots of issue here in terms of the spam filter, and to display url was an accident, with “the arrow/greater then” pointing the wrong way.

Anyway to your point. You sparked recognition of the descent and an article I did.

The “sound of the descent.” This also sparked recognition of various posts on the blogs in terms of sound, “Clifford’s B Flat,” and others. How do you bring this together with all the other “means of measure” in which we view the cosmos. JoAnne’s gamma ray picture of the Sun?

The Huygens probe was delivered to Saturn’s moon Titan by the Cassini spacecraft, which is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. NASA supplied two instruments on the probe, the descent imager/spectral radiometer and the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer

So this is one more aspect that has been developing. The “sound of gravitational” waves? I’ll have two links for consideration and the idea of bringing this into the pictures we have of the cosmos. I will address this in my blog post later.

Thanks for pointing this out.

Actually no, I don’t think it does. Most of my friends who go “huh”.

(For a baseline, I think the captions in the Astronomy of the Day archives are great.)

Check out: http://www.artsmia.org/get-the-picture/print/abbott.shtml
which has a few samples.

Someone should also mention “Doc” Edgerton of high speed photographic fame and one heck of a ukulele player. His drop splash pictures redefined the way we understand motion. Of course, he followed up on the work of Muybridge who did some of the first stop motion sequence photography.

For an interesting set of images, check out Beyond Vision (by Darius). It is chock full of great scientific images including a 19th century stereogram of the moon based on libration and the first color image of the stars, which was sold at the Mt Wilson gift shop, I believe, without comment on its historical interest.

Is it art or science? It is probably a bit of both. Wasn’t most Renaissance painting about the interaction of light and matter as reproduced in pigment? One can consider Guernica, or Henry the V, Part I, as art, or as politics. Why is the duality lost for science?

Photography is art, skill and technology. Ansel Adams’s landscape images were so sublime because he knew how to manipulate the camera, use shadow and light and composition with much skill. Likewise, the MRO photographs of Mars, I recall Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society claiming, could be hanging in a gallery (those false color topography pictures with wonderful texture). How one frames an image and causes another to look at something in a different way is the key to all art, and now we have this macroscopic technology, highly advanced telescopes, cameras, et cetera, to stretch photography even further.

A couple of years ago I got this link off of 3 Quarks Daily (such a wonderful blog): Princeton’s Art of Science Competition (remove asteriks) *http://www.princeton.edu/artofscience/gallery/*, which does have captions for each photo. I love looking at these images; one could just draw ants, just as the old Audubon books of sketched birds, but this is where technology has brought us now. And aren’t we driven towards aesthetics? We wouldn’t gurgle over beautiful sunsets if not and there’s a lot of science to be learned just looking at those.

Last week while perusing the physics section of the bookstore I thumbed through this book, Art & Physics, by Leonard Schlain, a surgeon apparently. It looked somewhat interesting, but has mixed reviews on Amazon - wondering if anyone is familiar with it. I had enough books in my hands as it was.

PlatoI still think the Cassini-Huygens probe “Titan Descent Data Movie with Bells and Whistles” video reminds me of an installation in the modern art section of our local museum. It looks like a souffle bursting on a plate, actually. “The Way Things Work” is on a TV installation, too…and that’s all mechanics.

Video link minus asteriks, but screen should be enlarged:
*http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/video-details.cfm?videoID=126*

The history of jazz music can be viewed as the struggle between constraint and freedom. Some prefer highly constrained styles (bebop), others like completely unconstrained “free” jazz, while many of us find that the most interesting structures emerge somewhere in the middle. Miles Davis, for instance, has recordings which range almost the entire spectrum, but my favorites are from the early and mid-60s. They are free enough to allow interesting new forms to emerge through improvisation but constrained enough to provide a useful conceptual framework, so the musicians (and listeners) can stay “on the same page” as it were.

Coltrane is another classic example of a jazz artist whose catalog ranges from the very highly ordered (Giant Steps) to the utterly chaotic (Stellar Regions et al), but for many fans his finest works are those towards the middle of this spectrum (My Favorite Things, A Love Supreme).

And her ability to produce these images, without the liberty of composing unphysical scenarios, or the liberal application of photoshop, does not detract from her talents. If anything, the restricted domain in which she works emphasizes her abilities. Although the sonnet is a severely constrained form of expression, I don’t see anyone arguing that Shakespeare’s contributions don’t qualify as art.

(Unfortunately CV’s WordPress setup disables select-copy-paste for its posts (as opposed to comments), so I had to locate the text in the page’s XHTML source.)

B’s got one as well in relation to, ” >a href=”http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/02/big-bang-bubbles.html”>Art and Science” you might like.

Off hand, I was thinking about Escher and Penrose in relation to the tessellations, and thought how important this relationship? Or views on dynamical triangulations, in relation to cubism?

The computerize techniques required for neutrino research would be similar I think, with regards to the dressing up the images from Hubble?

I think “sound” in this relation might be of interest in terms of the cosmology and how we see events as well?

This is a very perceptive statement. Adam, I hope you especially will read VDQI, because you already get one of the most important points. What Tufte shows, though, is just how destructive even the most innocuous-seeming elements of visual flash can be to effective communication.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

— Igor Stravinsky

More quotes from Stravinsky here.

Easier for us blackhearted art-hating conservatives, of course. So long as we get to shoot at poor people on our way back from Church in our SUVs, that’s all the art we need.

In general, I would say that all communication is mostly about appreciating the internal state of the audience. Quite often, some visual flash is entirely appropriate to the task of communicating whatever scientific material it is that you are trying to communication. The arrangement of the ‘facts’ can be quite varied without being a misrepresentation.

However, I’m not that excited by the picture of the ferrofluid, I am afraid. I have the cold, dark, arid heart of a conservative.

*A source of some minor irritation