杏吧原创

I WAS sceptical when I heard what was proposing. It was over lunch in September 2004 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and he was talking about the first time he saw the famous chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. As an artist working mainly in glass, he had been inspired to use them as the basis for a sculpture of the big bang. I was there by invitation, an astronomer hoping for a meaningful collaboration between science and art.

The Met鈥檚 chandeliers, a striking stylistic hybrid of 19th-century opulence and Sputnik-era modernism, were designed in 1965 鈥� coincidentally the year that the discovery of the cosmic microwave background provided the crucial evidence needed to back up big bang theory. Josiah鈥檚 idea was to remake one of the chandeliers into an eye-level sculpture of streamlined, modernist style and, at the same time, convert it to a scientifically accurate model with glass pieces representing galaxies and lamps representing quasars.

There was a problem. The Metropolitan chandeliers do resemble the popular conception of the big bang, as a tremendous explosion that flings fragments of matter in all directions from a central point. But that is not how cosmologists and astronomers see it. For us, it is not an explosion of material into space but the origin of space and time itself, initiating an expansion that occurs everywhere and has no centre. How could any static sculpture, no matter how intricate, ever depict that?

During our 3-hour conversation, a solution emerged: Josiah could retain the basic structure of the chandelier but change its interpretation by using a spatial dimension to represent time. That way the centre of the sculpture would become the primordial cosmos and the outer edge the present day, while the passage from one to the other would trace the 14-billion-year history of the expanding universe. Importantly, this space-to-time translation meant the sculpture could take into account many of the key features of cosmic evolution discovered over the past four decades.

Over the next eight months, I gave my collaborator a crash course in modern cosmology, and together we devised a detailed set of statistical rules by which the sculpture would encode the history of galaxies, quasars and cosmic expansion. We also worried about practical issues like how long the support rods could be without bending perceptibly, what spacings would keep the structure mechanically sound and yet possible to assemble, and how to ensure our 鈥渞andomly鈥� generated structure would remain balanced when suspended from a cable.

By the end of this phase, I had written 2000 lines of computer code that turned the design rules and practical constraints into a list of parts and assembly instructions. Josiah then started on the long task of hand-making 932 glass pieces in his Brooklyn studio, arranging manufacture of the metal parts with a company in California, and, in a chaotic final two weeks, working with a team from the Wexner Center to put it all together.

From the central sphere outwards, we adopted a logarithmic mapping between radial distance and cosmic epoch. So the shortest rods, at about 1 metre long, end 100 million years after the big bang, and they support either faint quasar lamps or clusters of a few small glass pieces with a disc-like form representing the earliest galaxies. Moving outwards towards the present, the glass pieces become larger, tracing the growth of galaxies as they attract gas from their surroundings and process it into stars.

Glass spheres representing elliptical galaxies formed by the chaotic collisions of stellar discs become increasingly common in the sculpture, especially in the dense central regions of the clusters. The clusters themselves grow in size and complexity, acquiring the extended filamentary structure seen in cosmological maps showing the distribution of galaxies. Lamps become brighter and more numerous, then fade in the outermost zone, tracing the rise and fall in the number of quasars.

This first sculpture, , was completed in 2005, and the title reflects Josiah鈥檚 long-standing interest in the history of modernism and his identification of 1965 as the time when a unifying artistic ideal fragmented 鈥� or perhaps exploded 鈥� into the diversity of perspectives known as postmodernism. Interestingly, it turned out that the Met鈥檚 chandeliers were redesigned at the last moment because the architect asked for a more 鈥済alactic鈥� appearance to relate to current thought in astronomy.

Josiah and I have collaborated on three subsequent artworks: , . The last of these is the most ambitious and in many ways the culmination of this four-year effort. It illustrates a speculative but widely discussed idea of contemporary cosmological theory: that our entire big bang universe may be just one of many 鈥渂ubbles鈥� in a background 鈥渋nflationary sea鈥� whose exponential expansion pulls the bubbles away from each other so rapidly that they have no chance to collide.

One of the five Island Universe sculptures follows the same rules as An End to Modernity, so it represents 鈥渙ur鈥� universe. The others have distinct forms that correspond to bubbles with different matter and energy content, or with different initial conditions. Even these five universe bubbles are just the local section of a much larger 鈥� perhaps infinitely large 鈥� multiverse that continues beyond the gallery walls.

One reason our collaboration has worked 鈥� and Josiah and I both consider it an unqualified success 鈥� is that he has been genuinely committed to understanding the science and representing it faithfully. In the early phases, Josiah would visit Columbus once a month, return to New York with a stack of reading assignments and come back a month later with a page of questions zeroing in on the key scientific issues. For my part, I have enough interest in modern art (my wife is a Picasso specialist) to appreciate the aesthetic and cultural themes Josiah draws on and to enjoy the challenge of designing works infused by science but not dominated by it.

Above all, the collaboration has worked because, in our very first conversation, we came up with design principles in which scientific and aesthetic ideas reinforced each other instead of tugging in different directions. There were a few long-discussed points, for example, the use of clear rather than coloured glass for galaxies, where aesthetic or practical considerations eventually won out over scientific ones, but on the whole I was surprised at the level of astronomical detail that fitted naturally into the sculptures. As Josiah told me, looking to the universe for inspiration led to 鈥渇orms that were stranger, and much more complex and compelling, than I could have come up with by mere invention鈥�.

In the end, these are artworks rather than science exhibits, and they are presented with a minimum of explanatory text. At first I was surprised that Josiah did not share my impulse to instruct the visitors and did not mind if they saw the sculptures without a 鈥渒ey鈥� to decode them. But I have gradually come around to his point of view, that anyone who explores the sculptures discovers a complex system of ordered randomness that demands interpretation. Of course, I still hope people eventually read the catalogue to discover the scientific principles behind the sculptures, but even without explanation the cosmological story they encode inspires a rich set of imagined stories in response.

鈥淚 was surprised Josiah did not mind if people saw the sculptures without a 鈥榢ey鈥� to decode them鈥�

This project has been far more consuming than I could have imagined four years ago, but also enormously rewarding. Cosmology is technical and precise, but it is also romantic, and collaborating with Josiah and writing and speaking about the sculptures has allowed me to take cosmological discoveries beyond the staid confines of astrophysical journals. I have also had a small glimpse into the world of contemporary art and the intricate interplay between philosophical and aesthetic ideas and the practical issues of constructing works, financing and exhibiting them, and even just moving them.

The biggest rewards, though, have been the collaboration itself and the spectacular finished products, which I hope to visit on my travels for decades to come.