Statement of a Scientific Artist

Scientists and artists are I believe more similar than people realise. They are both passionate about their work and prepared to work extraordinarily hard in pursuit of an idea. These ideas do not exist in a vacuum; they exist in relation to an existing body of work. Some individuals will add to that body of work but for those that are most daring their own work will challenge and may seek to overthrow our most basic ideas.

My own first inclination was to become a cosmologist. At that time I was a precocious teenager and cosmology was undergoing a transformation, as a great debate within the subject was to see the Big Bang theory rise to ascendancy and become the new orthodoxy. The evidence gathered in favour of the Big Bang was strong and its contender Steady State had clearly lost. I was horrified, as it looked to me like the most illogical of ideas had won. I knew that if I was to be a cosmologist I would I have to do battle with the new champion. I wanted to be daring but in the circumstances I moved away from the subject for it would have been a most formidable challenge. I changed direction and became an artist but I never lost interest in cosmology and continue to watch with keen interest from the sidelines.

More than a generation later the Big Bang still rules the roost but it has never fully resolved those logical problems. It is based on ideas that appear impossible to ever substantiate by experiment. Worse still there is no agreed physical theory that can explain the extraordinary conditions that must have existed in the first instance of existence. The Big Bang has contributed to a crisis in physics forcing physicists to search harder and harder to find a theory that can describe that mysterious moment of creation and the presumed brief period afterwards known as The Planck Epoch.

Most mysterious of all the Big Bang requires us to believe that time has a beginning. The argument in favour of time beginning arises in relativity where time is treated as a geometrical property like distance and all space-time can be curved into a sculptural form with finite limits. The effects of quantum mechanics however make the equations of relativity breakdown under these extreme conditions.

In the installation Timeless Universe shown at the Sala Parpallo, Valencia, Spain, I explore an alternative cosmology: perhaps time does not exist. This idea proposed by the English physicist Julian Barbour reaches beyond scientific cosmology, it has philosophical, experiential and psychological implications.

My thanks to my curator, Angela Molina for encouraging me to reveal more of my scientific side, Julian Barbour for taking part in the conference, Stephen Hopkins for reading my essay and providing many helpful criticisms and most of all to my life partner, Voravanna Tonkul, for tolerating my need to work hard in pursuit of an idea even while we were raising our now one year old daughter Natham. The full length version of this essay along with essays by Angela Molina and Julian Barbour will appear in the catalogue of the Timeless Universe exhibition due to be published in 2007.

June 2006 Read about Timeless Universe Installation.