I work at an art school now!

It's been a long time since I've posted here, and no better time that this new lunar year in my new home in Chicago, where I am currently a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). This place is amazing in so many ways, and especially for a scientist that appreciates art as much as I do, it's kind of dreamy. SAIC has a science requirement for its students, so there are loads of science classes offered and lots of scientists teaching here. I am currently teaching a course called the Science of Food. Yum. There is a Scientist in Residence Program, and just last week I got to see the coolest talk on the complicated nature of light from a physicist's (SAIC professor Kathryn Schaffer's) perspective. It was an amazing talk, well illustrated in both words and pictures on a topic that challenges our ability to communicate. How does one draw or describe something like light, which takes up space but is not a material thing, behaves both like a particle and like a wave, is invisible and yet allows us to see? That's where math comes in. But how to talk about the wave function in the equations? It's a challenge that stirs up all we take for granted in describing the physical world around us. And as a science educator, the talk made me think more carefully of how I used illustrations to convey nature to my students. If one is not careful, illustrations may give students the wrong impression about science and the nature of the universe.

The images used in the above poster for the talk, for example, are three different ways to represent light. Light propagates through space as a disturbance in the electric field. An electric field has both a strength and a direction, and the convention has been to indicate direction with an arrow, and strength with an amplitude or height of an arrow, hence the wave shape of how light is normally illustrated. But that can be a deceiving depiction, leading many to think that light actually moves that way in a sinusoidal fashion. It does not! Professor Schaffer prefers the bottom depiction, that conveys strength of the field by the thickness of the arrows, rather than by their length. It still conveys the same information as the top diagram of light, showing how the strength and direction of the fields alter as light moves through.

Now that I'm in a milieu where all sorts of things science and art are explored and discussed, I hope to get back to writing here. More soon to come!