On Monday there was a lecture at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore by William D. Phillips, Nobel Laureate called “Time, Einstein and the Coolest Stuff in the Universe”. It was the Vainu Bappu Memorial Lecture, with a huge crowd, a packed auditorium. Why I’m writing about it is that it was like a good old fashioned science lecture, full of wonderful, spectacular experiments. I realised I was actually on the edge of my seat!
He was talking about atomic clocks and that the cooling down of atoms increases the accuracy of measurements and timekeeping and this can matter for systems like GPS. He said that somewhere he went to, he walked past a door that said “Director of Earth Rotation”. The rotation of the earth is one kind of ‘tick’, its regular like a pendulum or the vibration of an atom, but, apparently the rotation of the Earth isn’t always the same - fantastic news - and so every so often the clocks and the Earth have to be synced back together.
The video is from the end of the lecture when everyone was crowding round and asking more questions. He used lots of liquid nitrogen - he was chucking it down the aisles - because he was wanting us to understand cooling. He wanted us to understand that his experiment is about cooling atoms to four million times cooler than the temperature of outer space. Its something too abstract and extreme to understand, so he must have wanted us to understand the relative strangeness of nitrogen’s freezing and boiling points as a step to believing what he was telling us. He said it was about “the adventure of getting to colder temperatures”
The atoms are cooled by lasers. As the resonance of the laser approaches that of the atom, it moves towards absorbing it and in the process looses energy and slows, which is what cooling is, slowing down. The other part of the problem was having a container for the atoms in which the atoms wouldn’t touch the sides and condense. This is to do with BEC: Bose-Einstein Condensation. So he explained the magnetic bottle with this levitating magnet experiment.
He had IIA work hard to include the experiments in the talk. In his vote of thanks, Bhanu Das said how loved he is as a teacher and scientist. You could see by the generosity of his explanations this was true. He gave us the keys to understand something very complex and extraordinary. He told a great story.
At the Solar Eclipse the skies belong to the people again and that’s why I had to go there, to see how I could make my own connection with the Solar System and how other people did too.
Hinduism contains an ancient science of eclipses that now manifest in rituals: not eating during an eclipse, not looking at an eclipse, taking a bath after the eclipse. The particular, unusual circumstances of an eclipse, more than likely create atmospheric disturbances that could make it wise to be indoors and not eat. The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre were making tests at Dhanushkodi, so maybe they would rediscover this.
I took a night bus to Madurai and then at six in the morning, a car to Rameshwaram. The sun rise was impressively rich and red-orange, it looked ready for a special day. With the morning mist it turned white like the moon. I was going to the place where the Bangalore Astronomy Society were meeting. I wanted to get a sense of how they helped people participate in astronomy.
The first people I found had this viewer, made with a mirror in the tube, a reflector to take the image down the box tunnel, a lens to focus and the tracing paper to catch the image.
Other people set up cameras with filters to take photos, but these were for one person at a time. I liked how these people had made something that let lots of people watch at once. I liked how the momentous singularity of the eclipse became reproduced on a tatty piece of tracing paper and a cardboard box, how it became part of the things on earth, not separate.
This was another device, made with a waste paper bin. Really like the little boy putting the goggles on to look. So funny!
The eclipse takes time and during that time we all found different ways to see the eclipse. What I found curious was tht you can’t look at the eclipse. You look most directly through your goggles, but even that feels like such a barrier and gives such an abstract black and white flat image. Its hard to think that this really is the moon passing over the sun. This was what I was trying to feel, that these were two celestial bodies and there was a distance between us, but the feeling didn’t come easily.
There was a tree on its own across the sands and I realised people must be looking at the shadows and for some time we all played with the pin hole-shadow-camera obscura.
A woman was making a pattern of holes, she made a paisley shape and together the group figured out how to cast the eclipses. Someone said we should make a heart next.
Then making the eclipse appear with our hands. That was very poetic. To use your hands instead of your eyes.
As the moon entered the sun entirely there was great excitement and crowding round the viewers. This was what people wanted because they could photograph and look at the same time.
Two ladies lay on the ground watching through the goggles and it seemed to me that was the best way to look, forget the photos. So for this first or second contact that’s what I did. There is something extremely beautiful about this shape with the inner circle just touching the outer circle. Its the point at which everyone cries out to see ‘Bailey’s Beads’, the slightly bumpy edge, and this I was told later is actually caused by the craters and mountains of the moon. The texture of the moon itself is what you see, very wonderful.
I wear my Grandma’s wedding ring when I travel alone here sometimes. A gold ring. I look at other people’s photos now of this annularity and it gives me time to remember how beautiful this gold ring of the sun was to see, even in this very patchy, messy way that we were seeing.
Somebody said that the skies use to belong to everyone equally, but now that science, scientists and scientific instruments have discovered so much more, when we look at the skies we are ignorant. We know that what science knows is way beyond us. The cities too have taken away the stars that we could know.
As an artist interested in creating group viewing experiences for watching the cosmos, it was easy to see that these contraptions could be pushed a further, that if the image was projected into a dark room, like the meditation hall we were right next to, the number of people able to watch and the quality of seeing could become much richer, by paying attention to the aesthetics.
I was using a mirror to put the eclipse on the Swami Vivekanandar Memorial Hall.
The little boy who looked like a Bollywood star wanted to do the same and he put the image momentarily inside the doorway of the hall and there it was, the eclipse inside a dark building, very stunning. I don’t have the picture and the rush towards annularity was starting, but that would have been the thing to do.
This is a picture my friend Rohini Devasher took of the eclipse chasers she was with from Delhi S.P.A.C.E. (Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators) in Varkala, just to see some more of this range of instrumentation for looking at something, the sun, that lets us see, but which we can’t see directly, that blinds us.
I’d love to make a building and a mirror for next time. But at the eclipse I liked the makeshift technology, the hands on processes, th way we formed a group helping each other to see. On the way back I was talking to the three amateur astronomers who gave me a lift about putting in a proposal to use the Kavalur observatory. Pavan didn’t think non-professionals would have any hope of access, but I got really defensive and said yes they could and that its only when you bring in people from other backgrounds to understand and use technology that new applications can be found. Rishi said that was what had happened with computers. It was suddenly very clear that the instrumentation of cosmic observation is proprietary and attached to hierarchies of knowledge and that this solar eclipse was a rare opportunity to break that down and for people to create their own observatories.
I went back to the Mullard Space Science Lab one year after doing the Satellite Stories event there.
I wanted to find out what people remembered from it and if anything had changed. I’d thought that the sunset to darkness walk round the grounds with the scientists and engineers telling their stories, would be a memorable event, a way for people to remember what was being said better than through a formal lecture. At least what happened is that people surely heard things they wouldn’t have heard in a formal lecture. The memory part: I’m not sure if people really remembered what was said. Maybe what they were left with was a memory of what happened, that some thing unusual had happened with the science and the things that were said and the way they were said.
My day was that mixture again of exhilaration to be allowed to be included and listen in on the extraordinary circumstances of the place and that isolation of being the person from the opposite side of the world asking question and hoping for things that will never really come into existence, being misunderstood and being wrong about my assumptions.
Things had changed. Lucie said that the local people had been included in the planning process for the next open day. That instead of them deciding what people would like, they asked. The locals had a list of topics. I don’t know that they wanted Satellite Stories again. I don’t think that would ever have come about through asking people what they wanted. People like to stay to the paths. Satellite Stories was about creating a new path so that if somebody did want to walk along it, they could. There are the boundaries in people’s heads to deal with. For the moment though the Lab and local people want to be friends now they’ve met.
I think I underestimate too, how much interaction the scientists there have with visiting groups. I should ask Lucie for a typical week, because there is a constant flow here. She said there were motivators starting to appear. There’s a section in the grant application forms for ‘impact’ and it means describing the connection with the public. I’ve been reading “Science in Public” and it traces the science/public debate in UK from around the 80’s, so I imagine these kinds of inclusions derive from this and public policy making.
Lucie said of the meeting:
“We’ve agreed that as well as us doing events where the community come in, we’ll also (start to go out). Another thing they wanted, a lot of then have got telescopes so thought it would be fantastic if we had an evening when we all brought our telescopes up and we had an observing event. So that will be the next thing I organize…I thought that’s such a good idea. I’d never thought about something where they actually bring their telescopes in…It was really nice to have the opportunity to hear what they wanted, rather than trying to second guess. Yeah and it was a direct result of having Satellite Stories and starting to think about a two-way dialogue and having something on an equal footing, rather than just saying this is what we’re going to do.”
So next I talked to Myrto. I wanted to know about her conversations with people. She told me about this point of interaction. She said she was really amazed at how much interest there was in what they do, in astrophysics/space science. It made her sure they should be doing more of it, these interactions. She came across a difference in the kind of interest she has, as a professional scientists and the kind of interest she met. In the work she does, she said that things like counting galaxies can be as pedestrian as counting boxes. There are few moments when you encounter the ‘bigger picture’ and it was this ‘bigger picture’ that people were interested in. She said it was odd how big a step it was to get into their mind set, but that it was a good thing to do. She knew that what she was saying was very curious. I thought that what she was saying was that these thoughts she was expressing only happened through an encounter, in conversation. The one we were having and the ones she was describing.
“Its very difficult to understand how the public views this whole science, its, its very difficult for me and I guess for a lot of other professionals because we’re in it and its hard to see it from someone who’s not, from the point of view of someone who’s not in it, but from the reactions that I get, it shows that people are fascinated, they want to know more, they’re very interested. But I don’t understand, I sort of understand why they would find it fascinating but I can’t feel what they feel.”
Then I talked to someone who’s name I’ve mixed up and it was that encounter that makes me feel like giving up. He hadn’t been at Satellite Stories, but I wanted to know what he thought had happened. I wondered if anyone had talked about it after or if everyone had gone silent about the ‘weird thing’. He said, it was something about pictures - people told you stories and you drew pictures of what you thought they were. Nightmare, the usual story of the artist drawing pictures. Really demoralising. Much later, I realised that he had actually listened to what I’d said. When I was first researching I’d been saying things like, I like the picture people draw in my head when they tell me about the spacecraft they work on.I mean what would anybody make of that. And really, he had a good idea for me. That’s exactly what I should do, or do with a group of people, children, artists, students - a drawing class. Bring people in to talk only and see what can be drawn. It would be a great collaboration - call it “artists’ impressions”!
Then the engineers in the drawing room. It wasn’t the best day for insights. Last time I left with the richest descriptions of Baikonour and Kourou launch sites. This time, I couldn’t really gauge whether Satellite stories had been a good idea. But what was anyone suppose to make of it. I think by this time I was hoping that maybe somebody would realise that I hadn’t done this as a workshop, I’d done it as an artwork and it had form and depth and structure, it was avant garde, a hybrid of materials and media. Many things and as often happens with artworks, many things taken for granted and seemingly lost.
I asked about the change that happens when a spacecraft leaves the earth. Yes, the Japanese change the name of the spacecraft once it is launched. Good for them. At least there’s the possibility there of someone in the space science field acknowledging that a philosophical change also happens. But nobody in the drawing room seemed to want to have the conversation about perception.
My favourite thing is to talk to Andrew Coates. He loves to talk about what he does and as Associate Director, I suspect that he has the choice to put himself on the most imaginative and exploratory of missions. The next morning at 7 am Cassini would be passing through a belt of ions, around Enceladus and he couldn’t wait to pick up the data and have that feeling of being the first to know, see, experience a new view of that planet, of the nature of our solar system and the universe. That night he was to be giving an after dinner speech for a group of Actuaries. He wasn’t sure what he would talk about, but I thought he should tell them what he’d just told me about Cassini and 7 am the next morning.
I wrote in my notebook - it seems like he’s constantly communicating and in this mindspace of finding out what people are interested in. There are these great communicators (in science) – I realize I’m hatching a theory that the public participation is the thing that generates the realization of what is exciting, that creates the drive and uncannily rich thinking-
Before this I’d sat in the Common Room, feeling the project to be a waste of energy for the lack of interpretation. I guess I thought I’d tried to help people at the Lab, but nobody seemed to realise, when Hervé came by. He hadn’t been there either, but we had a long talk nonetheless about what I’d been trying to do. He thought it was about bringing the old stories of the place to people there now, which it partly was, well very much was, bringing the stories of the people together.
“I thought for me you were trying to make people remember everything that happened, in a creative way, an artistical way. I think somehow you did it because you approached the problem differently. People – I don’t know, I wasn’t there! Its difficult for me to comment. ”
But it didn’t really matter that he hadn’t been there and didn’t know: he made me feel better about the whole thing. And the feeling bad is about finding the invisible boundaries. Its kind of like commando work.
Am looking back through books. One page is about the symposium at NIAS ages ago. I had been trying to find the presentation that Shiv Visvanathan gave and I think I’ve found it. It was wonderful, about the imagination of science and the imagination of democracy. Here in England, its truly difficult to get anyone to pay attention to India, to what India might be, to what science and technology might seem like there, to what people think. England is truly insular and its hard to figure out what’s useful about that.
The talks were inspiring and I thanked Shiv Visvanathan in the car park afterwards and shook his hand and some time I want to find him again and talk to him. But after the talk also people didn’t want to talk and in the questions, Yashas asked all the artists to put up their hands and there were a surprising number and somehow it seemed that there was a disconnect with what was being said on the stage and the experiential research practices of these Bangalore-based artists. So in my book I wrote:
“but everyone kept the safe hierarchy of the stage and the auditorium and the microphone. No one realised that to achieve what they wanted, they would have to do the stupidly simple thing of stepping off the stage into a hallway or canteen or garden or street.”
Then there’s something that he must have said in the talk:
“For every poetics of Innovation we need a theory of waste”
and then on the next page:
“The stars are beautiful because of a flower one cannot see…”
I haven’t been here for a very long time. Its nice to write my password and go through the gate. I feel like I’ve been staying in somebody else’s house for a while. Today and yesterday felt more familiar. We built the geostationary orbit and making things is like a cipher, the thing you are making tells you things about itself, through the medium.
This is about visiting the Indian Deep Space Network this week. The huge white dishes follow the moon every day, East to West. While we were there, a movie was streaming down, live, of the surface of the moon. It took me a while to realise that it was live. I didn’t know what to think of it, how to watch it, take it in. It was on a computer screen, a gradual sweep of the Fore, Aft and Nadir cameras. Very spectacular encounters can happen in the world, but still your brain, my brain, may only think of them as ordinary and incidental.
Everything is brand new and its all working fantastically. The engineers are incredible and completely understated in describing what they have done there, created cutting edge technology for India, built it from scratch, with breathtaking speed. They are generous with their time and explanations, hospitable and friendly. Just a handful of men, speaking Telegu, liking their work.
I want to say something that strikes me about this visit, because the last thirty two metre dish I visited was in Goonhilly in Cornwall, UK. There the engineers were fighting to stop the demolition of the sixty four dishes on the site. In 1962, the first dish was built as a ground station for Telstar and it received the first live transatlantic message. It had been the brand new future then. I wanted to say something about this, but luckily nobody was listening to my foreigner voice. I didn’t really want to say it as a dire prediction, just that I was struck by the timescales of the future and this as a renewal of energy. I suppose I was trying to make a connection where there wasn’t one. I suppose I thought these engineers might be interested in the stories of the retired and redundant engineers in Cornwall, but in the future, histories don’t repeat. I felt really proud of them and pleased that they were making everything themselves and keeping a disconnect with the past. Glad that nobody listened to me, because, what was I thinking, I find it impossible to think about the future. I’m thinking of a time when these men have stories to tell of what it was like in the beginning and why the dishes need to be preserved. I suppose, its not that I’m seeing the future of the Deep Space Network in the Goonhilly Satellite Station, its that I’m seeing the past of the Goonhilly engineers in the wonderful people I met last week at ISTRAC.
It seems a long time after the event to be writing back my thoughts!
I wanted to make sure at some point I had fed back to you and people who took part, where the ideas came from and why I wanted to collaborate on the storytelling event we did together. Also to find out from you, what people thought, which will help me think about how to develop. I do apologise for sending such a long email to everyone! but lots of people were involved.
The idea came originally from the time I spent at the Space Science Lab, UC Berkeley as Visiting Fellow, where, to understand what was happening at the Lab, I would spend my days chatting to people and recording the conversations. I was interested in finding out the connections between people and spacecraft, so I would ask “which spacecraft are in your head”, and from these lists, generated a kind of cloud of connections between people in that building and spacecraft. Like MSSL, the UC Berkeley Lab is a distinctive building, on the top of the ridge, looking out onto Golden Gate Bridge and amazing sunsets.
From the recordings, I wrote up a book of the stories people had told me about their spacecraft and re-edited the stories around themes, one was about lost spacecraft, for instance.
At MSSL I wanted to do a similar mapping, but I’d started to go to storytelling events and was thinking about the conversations as stories belonging to an oral tradition. Stories I was listening to were about grand themes of humanity, told through comedy or allegory. It seemed to me that the stories of the spacecraft were also about these overriding themes of the universe and our place in it and that there should be ways for them to be absorbed into a contemporary and grass roots oral culture.
In the face of the complexity of spacecraft and space science, I’ve been struck by how well the human voice demystifies. Actually, how good the people I spoke to at MSSL, were at explaining to me what they do and always believing I could understand. I don’t have a science background, everything I know has come through conversations! I noticed too, that the descriptions people gave me always created strong images in my head and changed my imagined environment. The spacecraft create markers in otherwise, for me, undefined space and they become mental markers that help me imagine distance and the profusion of particle interaction happening throughout the solar system and beyond.
Satellite Stories was about sharing this experience with more people and bringing listeners and ’storytellers’ together. Particularly, when you work very intensely in a place, you often don’t get that chance at an overview. So my hope was it would be an event for people at MSSL to see what it is you do, as much as for people from outside. I also wanted to create strong memories for people. Many cultures use techniques of attaching information to place and architecture in order to remember better ( such as Aboriginal songlines and Roman orators). That was part of the impetus for using the house and gardens and using sunset and lanterns to transform the spaces. Also, habits form and we get use to presenting in the same kinds of contexts - lecture rooms with power point. It was brilliant that you were willing to try this out and I wanted to tap into the performance and improvisation skills that you all seem to have naturally because you are so involved in your work and so use to presenting.
Somebody pointed out to me after the event that it had been about the experiences that the technology brings to people. I thought this was very perceptive. There was such richness in the descriptions of making, launching, travel to launch sites, the experiences brought to you of environments in space and the beautiful environment you work in and what it feels like to commit to long term, ambitious, fragile and innovative technologies. They are narratives that I don’t think are included in ‘Science’ I’m not sure are really acknowledged outside of the field because there are still not enough interdisciplinary studies, so this has become a new focus for me: documenting the human stories of technology.
Many more people contributed to the development of the event than took part and along the way there were many fantastic moments that I wish more people had witnessed, such as Cluster opps explaining the orbits with so much dynamic discussion and diagrams, or Roy telling me about the thinking spaces of the garden. I’m hoping I can put together at least one podcast that can encapsulate the range of voices I recorded and the amazing discoveries I made through so many wonderful conversations.
Tonight the terracotta tiles on the house outside my balcony look like they have a frost. It’s the moonlight. The moon is full and impossibly bright tonight. Today I read about its craters full of glass and the sparklies in the sand and the rays of glass beads.
I’d never heard before that the moon is full of glass. No wonder it shines.
Can we think through a new imagination? What is the imagination of India, what is the imagination of science. What does science stand for in the face of nomadic and marginalised imaginations? Is imagination about conjuring an aura and where do these exist, where are they allowed to exist? What are knowledge societies? Are they the ones that deny the rights to imagination?
Maybe the word ’science’ is the biggest problem. It has formality. There isn’t much love there, it can sometimes seem.
Its very evident when you go to a talk that many of the problems being talked about could be solved if everyone would just make their way out of the auditorium and into the garden.
There is of course so much humanity, humility, assurance, attachment, any number of things, like plants in a forest, in this word, science, it’s whether the stories are told or not and different stories grow in different places.
