Physicists often talk about the beauty of equations or the elegance of theories. Dawn Meson, a San Francisco-based artist, has harnessed that aesthetic quality in a collection of paintings that depict quantum phenomena. It鈥檚 an ambitious undertaking 鈥� after all, the things she paints are invisible.
鈥淚鈥檓 not actually trying to illustrate the phenomena,鈥� says Meson. 鈥淚鈥檓 using painting to wrap my head around these complicated ideas.鈥� This painting, entitled Compactification IV, represents the curling up of unseen spatial dimensions, a fundamental aspect of string theory. The complex shapes of these dimensions determine the vibrations of strings, which, so the theory goes, give rise to the particles that comprise our world.
Meson鈥檚 aim is to take this abstract world and give it a visual language through colour, shape and texture. The sphere in the upper left corner represents our usual three-dimensional world. The coloured swirls correspond to additional dimensions, she says. This painting is part of a collection called 鈥淪pecific Conversations鈥� that arose from conversations between Meson and her friend Stephon Alexander, a physicist at Penn State University. The collection will be exhibited at Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois, from 27 June to 6 September.
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