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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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CBC Ideas has a pretty good podcast series called How to Think About Science. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin was on talking about his book, The Trouble With Physics. The book and the talk both provide a nice analysis of the current political and funding structures that have put string theorists in the majority of gainfully employed physicists, even though string theory still hasn't generated any experimental evidence.
Quote from the podcast: Nobody has been able to extract anything that is what we call falsifiable, that is, if it's not seen then the theory is wrong. And this has just never happened before in the history of physics. As radical as general relativity was, even before Einstein had it in final form he knew what the key experiments were. ... He had several predictions that could be done with the technology of the time within two years, three years. Same thing with special relativity, same thing with quantum mechanics, same thing in every successful instance in the history of physics. The experimental check comes right away. There's always the contact with nature. It's very easy to invent mathematical structures, mathematical games that make no contact with reality. But a situation where some thousand, very gifted, very highly placed people in the most elite places in the world, passionately believe in something and have worked on it for two decades without a hint of how to test it experimentally, that's unlike anything that's ever happened before in the history of physics.Also, Smolin had some really nice things to say about Toronto.
Quote from the podcast: I have the impresion that science is part of the front of culture as culture evolves, and culture progresses and those of us who are at the front — scientists, artists, social theorists, architects, so forth — have a lot to say to each other. That maybe we lose out with the over-specialization and departmentalization. And there are venues for that conversation. Some of them are conferences, some of them are friendships, some of them are cities. A city is a venue for conversation, that's what they're for. As a New Yorker who moved to Toronto, I'm pretty excited about Toronto, that is, the people I meet here from theatre, films, music, writers, people in technology, people in politics. Toronto is more like New York than it is like London or Paris. It's a more open accessible city. You can be in Paris forever and never meet anyone who does anything different from you. Whereas in New York, once you're somehow in New York, you are continually meeting people who do something other than you, and Toronto is like that as well. I think I'm in a very lucky position because I've been fortunate enough to be able to write books as part of this community.
(found)
In more exciting bee news...
photo by Rob Cruickshank
Resonating Bodies is a big art, sound and research project about bees and other pollinators by Sarah Peebles, in collaboration with Rob King, Rob Cruickshank and Anne Barros. There's going to be a speaker's series with bee experts, a new bee-wasp condo on Toronto Island and an art/sound installation that L.M. will not be visiting, called Bumble Domicile.
Bumble Domicile, the first installment of the Resonating Bodies project, uses an on-site bumblebee hive at *new* Gallery (906 Queen street West) and displays video and audio of its internal activity. Headphones that "plug" into the actual hive give the viewer opportunity to hear the bees in real time. Ultraviolet video of flowering plants in the building's communal garden is projected onto the North wall of the gallery to provide live tracking of the bees pollination.There's lots more information about the project, including the schedule for the speaker's series, at Interaccess.org. Visit Sarah Peebles' website for research images and an audio sample.
Continuous audio transformations of pre-recorded bees and shoh (the Japanese mouth-organ, an instrument which has utilized beeswax since ancient times) fill the gallery space. Visitors are invited to place aromatic offerings into a heated copper tray, which resembles the interior of the hive. This copper tray was created through a unique process involving the remnants of a discarded bumblebee hive.
RESONATING BODIES- BUMBLE DOMICILE
A co-presentation between InterAccess Media Arts Centre and New Adventures in Sound Art
Come and meet your most misunderstood neighbors, but don't mention honey...
Resonating Bodies- Bumble Domicile (part 1)
July 4-27 2008
*new* Gallery 906 Queen Street West,(corner of Crawford and Queen W.)
Opening Reception Saturday July 12th 4-6pm at *new* Gallery
Followed by "The forgotten Pollinators," a talk by Dr. Stephen
Buchmann at InterAccess, 9 Ossington Avenue, 7pm
A truck carrying 12 million honey bees overturned on the highway in New Brunswick this week. The commercial bee industry has been big news lately, since so many of the bees started mysteriously dying.
Panoptic Series 2006