Why I Made “The Planck Plank”
I’m writing these essays on my pictures for More Than Glass in the order I made the pictures. “The @ Clock,” for the small circle token, was first thing I made and the direction of my approach to the whole piece, really. Then I made the background token, “The End Of All Our Exploring”, which I wrote about yesterday. The image I made for the one token- “The Planck Plank,” as it turned out- came next.
Now, at this point, before I get to that, I need to introduce an image referenced by all five of my final images for More Than Glass and making visual a guest appearance, in some form or other, in four of them.
That’s this image:
I needed a way to bind the ideas I had for the piece, both visually and conceptually, and I found it as I noodled through Google. There was a good public domain image available as well, which helps; it especially helps when, like me, you can’t draw and have no technical skills in the creation of art of any kind. I just make collages, really. I talk about books for a living and so, if I do say anything worth hearing, it’s probably a quotation. Well, that’s pretty much how I make art.
So the first thing that struck me about Vanitas was that it tied the ideas I had for the piece together visually, because 105Collective had agreed on this format for More Than Glass:
And if you play with the aspect ratios a bit, this happens:
Good start: Vanitas gave me a visual cue for how I was going to fill everything in and give it all continuity; and the more I thought about it, the more it gave me a conceptual cue as well. This passage I found while reading around the painting was what I needed: it did that lovely thing where someone puts into words an idea you’ve felt but couldn’t quite articulate (or maybe that’s a fiction of my arrogant consciousness and it just gave me the damn idea, but anyway…):
“Normally a still life doesn’t have a definite past. You don’t feel that the arrival of these particular objects in this particular place was an event. You see a bunch of inanimate things by themselves, and you don’t really wonder how they got there. Sometimes they may look like the scattered remains of a meal. Sometimes they suggest more casual object traffic. But you’re not asked to imagine a deed by which the assembly was created. You don’t think that this pot or this fruit landed where it is at a particular moment. The things are just there. They came together, somehow, sometime.
But de Champaigne’s Vanitas is timed.”
Tom Lubbock
But de Champaigne’s Vanitas is timed, says Lubbock.
The elements all relate to time and stand in time.
There was my conceptual cue, organizing with the visual cue. The tulip in the vase? Momentary time, the instantaneous. I could talk about the other elements and their relationship with time and the symbolism of de Champaigne’s Vanitas, but I’ve done that in each essay for each piece.
And anyway, this is where we came in.
The present moment; “The Planck Plank”.
The tulip in the vase in Vanitas is usually understood to represent ephemerality. I had a Sacred Heart in mind to express the significant but momentary: the first eye contact with a life partner; the moment of a child’s birth; the moment of a parent’s death. The tulip became flames, a flash of flames.
The vase became the heart itself, which I based on this etching,
…and then altered with Deep Dream and a collage I made of circuits turned neon to indicate one interval in the cyclic rate of all things, from persons to computers to electrons (7 quadrillion revolutions per second, by the way. I checked).
To keep the whole thing representative of the one token, I tied it together with what I had to hand (as I say: I just make collages, really). What I had to hand was a piece of wood, left over from another project, and a physicist (my son, who I’ve already written about in my essay on The End Of All Our Exploring). We had a long chat about the right formula to use to express, for want of a better term, the frame-rate of nature, and…well, I’ll let him explain it.
“The inequality seen is known as Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle. The delta symbol (the triangles) represent an uncertainty in some measurement, here of space (x) and momentum (p). The idea is that there is a fundamental limit to how precise one can measure these quantities. If the uncertainty in position (x) is lowered by honing in your measurement of that quantity, the uncertainty of momentum (p) must increase in order to keep that inequality as is. As such, the most precise anyone can be on these measurements is hbar/2. In layman’s terms, the more you know about where you are, the less you know about how fast you are going.
hbar in this is the modified planck constant, the value that relates the energy of a photon to its frequency. Since we consider a photon to be an elementary particle and massless, we can fairly accurately say that hbar is the units in which a lot of quantum mechanics is measured, much like cm on a metre stick. Given that the photon is the force particle for the electromagnetic force, the prevalence of hbar is a given by construction. Any object in the universe that has charge operates using the electromagnetic force. This includes atoms, electrons, quarks, protons etc
The reason that we focus on position and momentum here is not an example plucked at random. The two are known as conjugate or complementary variables. These are found when variables can be associated with each other via conservation/symmetry laws. Conservation of momentum is one of the key tenets of physics and conservation of momentum is based on a symmetry: translational invariance. This is the idea that physics is the same over here as it is over there, wherever ‘there’ might be. Taking a moving object to another area of the Universe or doing your calculations in another coordinate system other than Cartesian shouldn’t change anything.
Momentum and position aren’t the only two variables like this. There is also energy and time where the conservation of energy comes with the associated ‘time translational’ symmetry. This means that if I ran the clock back on the Universe, physics shouldn’t be any different; just the other way around. If I ran a video of a train going from left to right backwards on an empty background, you wouldn’t be able to tell which the original orientation was. There are also versions relating to angular momentum, rotations and many other considerations of symmetry.
Conservation laws and symmetries are inexorably linked. This was discovered by mathematician Emmy Noether who put forward the mathematical formalism known as Noether Symmetry. She showed that for every conservation law there is an associated symmetry and vice versa. This is incredibly powerful because now physicists have a method for relating well known conservation laws to possible new symmetries and also, crucially, had a rigorous mathematical way to link the two. This allowed for the discovery of new particles and was instrumental in quantum theory. Einstein said that he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did without the work of Noether and the process of working out Noether symmetries of a system is still how we carry out research in quantum theory today.
Dad is a benny.”
Joe M. M. Davies
Yes, I did notice that bit at the end.
But I left it in.
Because life is about little moments like that.
Little moments like this.
