New Scientist documentary on Quantum Reality

New Scientist have created a documentary on Quantum Reality, inviting physicists and mathematicians to comment on the subject. Scientists from the Gravity Laboratory at Nottingham University were interviewed and Professor Silke Weinfurtner (who leads the Gravity Laboratory) and Dr. Ulrike Kuchner (Curator of Cosmic Titans) were interviewed and discussed artworks from the show Cosmic Titans at Nottingham's Lakeside Arts Gallery.

Silke Weinfurtner talked about the way that artists had interacted with scientists in the group, the interview discusses Conrad Shawcross's work and then mine.

The way they approach things is different, they have a lot of technical skills that opened up new ways of exploration also for us, which made the whole scientific approach much more playful...

One direct example with one of the artists, Alistair McClymont, together we are developing sensors for quantum vortices in quantum liquids and these are extremely hard to see. At the moment we are developing techniques using lasers. When Alistair came he suggested we also explore techniques using white light, a torch, to visualise quantum vortices which led us to look into old-style optics and it turns out that in principle you can go down this route, you don't always need to work with the most posh system, you can go back and approach the whole problem from a different angle. So it has already changed the way we are developing these sensors.

The artwork An Early Universe is a result of this back and forth between my studio experiments and the scientists experimental setup in their lab at the Gravity Laboratory. The work with the scientists is ongoing and techniques developed in the artwork have been put in place in a new experiment at Nottingham University. I was recently at the University helping to set up a very similar technique using liquid helium rather than water. More on that to follow soon.

My artwork is on show right now at the Science Gallery in London in a show title Quantum Untangled, more info on the links below.

The videos below show the full documentary: The Quantum Reality: Why the Universe Isn’t What It Seems and the shorter excerpt from that where Silke and Ulrike talk about the artwork: Can art help scientists better understand the quantum universe?