Drift: Art and Dark Matter
Thursday, September 9, 2021
On Thursday, September 9, 2021, there were no scheduled physics lectures at UBC because it was the first day of classes but then I got an email from Theresa Liao of the physics department at UBC saying that the Belkin Art Gallery at UBC was having an art exhibition about dark matter. They were having a grand opening, that day September 9, at 6:00 pm that would include a discussion with the artists. I love both art and physics, so I decided to go to it. It was free but you were supposed to RSVP so I sent them email saying that I was going. I took the 27 to Joyce-Collinwood Station, and then the R4 to UBC. I left at 3:00, and arrived at 4:20. I then walked to the Belkin Art Gallery, which I had been to two times before. One time, they had art about neuroscience, so they have previously had art about science. When I approached the gallery, I noticed that their lawn had not been mowed. I wondered if it had something to do with COVID-19. However, it turned out that the unmowed unkept lawn was, in fact, an artwork. An artist was trying to recreate the natural ecosystem on the grounds of the art gallery as some sort of living environmentalist art installation. I sat some distance away under a tree, waiting for it to begin.
At 5:50, I walked inside, and said that I was there for the performance about dark matter. Other people were already there. I prefer to walk through an art gallery alone, and usually I am alone, but since this was the opening day, there were lots of other people. First, I went in a room where lights were being projected onto the floor. It was in a 2 x 3 grid of large squares, mostly tan with black splotches. The lights turned on and off to represent breathing. Then I went to the hallway outside the large rooms. Hanging on the wall were paintings by several artists. There were groups of abstract paintings by a woman named Nadia Lichting. There were pictures that looked like a large number of small pieces of pictures put together in a collage by a man named Jol Thoms. I would read the small descriptions, and then look at the pictures. Then I walked into a large room with a large elaborate art installation with many components. It was all made by Jol Thoms. Initially, there were to many people in the room for me to enjoy it but then the room cleared out so I could enjoy it better. There were two large steel pieces hanging from the ceiling that were continuously rotating. They were supposed to represent hypercubes or tesseracts. You were also supposed to look at their shadows on the floor. They were supposed to represent the higher dimensions predicted by string theory. On the wall at the other side of the room was a large TV screen playing a video that the artist had made. It was supposed to be about the SNOLAB dark matter detector in a mine in Sudbury, Ontario. The video combined video and photographs that had been digitally manipulated, computer animation, and text being read out loud by a narrator accompanied by the written text on the screen. There were quotes by physicists trying to explain the physics. Also, around the floor of the room were several small rocks on the floor, which were rocks taken from the SNOLAB site, with blue tape and chains on the floor connecting them. Hanging on the wall were old geology maps of the SNOLAB site, and a copy of an early 19th Century treaty that the British government had with the Indians from that region. Then I walked into another room, and there was what looked like a giant beaker containing glowing green liquid. There was a UV light shining on it, and I used it to make my shoelaces light up. Also, in that room, was a screen showing bright lights whizzing by a black background. I stood in front of it. You could imagine the small white lights as stars, but also as fundamental particles. I went back to the room that had lights looking like large tan squares projected onto the floor. Then a girl volunteering at the art gallery came in, and said that we should move to the room where the artists will be speaking.
I walked to the other room. They did not have many chairs because of COVID-19, which did not make any sense because that will not protect you from COVID-19. They were sending a live video feed of the talk to a TV screen outside their art gallery so people could watch it outside if they want. I sat on the floor next to the wall on the left hand near the front of the room. Sitting on a gray couch at the front of the room were the two artists, the man named Jol Thoms, on the left, and the woman named Nadia Lichtig, on the right. A woman working for the Belkin Art Gallery gave a long winded introduction, listing their numerous achievements and awards. Of course she had to recite the obligatory mantra “We are the unceded territory…” Sporadically throughout the talk, there was annoying high pitched noises that a man claimed was caused by the artist’s cell phones interfering with their video camera.
The artists had zero understanding of physics. Everything they said was wrong. I hate someone trying to talk about something they know nothing about. I knew ahead of time that it was going to be bad. It was worse than I thought.They would toss out physics phrases like “quantum field theory” while having zero clue what the words mean. They were just babbling gibberish.
I could tell that earlier physicists had tried to explain the physics to them the way a physicist might at a public outreach event or being interviewed by a journalist. Now imagine that a random member of the public without a background in science attended a physics public outreach event and afterwards was assigned the task of speaking in front of another audience of members of the general public, and explain what they had heard the physicist say earlier. This was very similar to that. While these two artists were babbling gibberish they would toss out physics words and phrases that they had heard a physicist say earlier, without having the slightest clue what the words mean. Worse than that, they would believe they understood it when they did not understand it. Physicists had previously tried to explain the physics to these two artists who did not understand a word of it, but believed they understood it, and later I was witnessing these artists trying to repeat what the physicists had said, tossing out physics words and phrases without the slightest clue what the words mean, and trying to repeat what they heard a physicist say earlier, but they could not remember what the physicist said, so what was coming out of their mouths was a garbled mangled version of what a physicist had told them earlier. However, with my knowledge of physics, I was able to take their garbed mangled version and reconstruct what the physicist had probably told them earlier.
For example, at one point Jol Thoms said, “Dark matter particles go faster than the speed of light which creates a type of radiation which they then detect”. Of course there is no such thing as “faster than light”. What he was actually referring to was the fact that SNOLan is a water Cherenkov detector. Because of the refractive index of water, the speed of light in water is less than that in vacuum. A charged particle traveling through water faster than the speed of light in water, will outrun its own electric field, creating wavefront called Cherenkov radiation. SNOLab was designed to detect neutrinos, which interact by W exchange to create a charged lepton, muon or electron, or when they elastically scatter off electrons, where the electrons are detected. It is these leptons, moving faster than the speed of light in water, which produce the Cherenkov radiation, which is then detected by photomultiplier tubes. Notice how Jol Thomas said “type of radiation’ because he could not remember the word “Cherenkov”. You can read more about it here.
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/physics/research/particle/neutrino/water-cherenkov
At another point, Jol Thomas said, “In China, they will smash particles together which will turn into black holes which then evaporate into a shower particles proving higher dimensions”. He is presumably referring to a plan in China to build a collider called the Circular Electron–Positron Collider. As with the LHC, Future Circular Collider, and other proposed big colliders, they are hoping to see evidence for beyond the Standard Model physics, such as supersymmetric particles or other new particles, micro black holes, or extra dimensions. If experimentalist claims evidence for new physics, it would not be a slam dunk. It would be at most a small deviation from the Standard Model prediction. Any initial claims would below the proverbial five sigma. Any initial claims would be met with skepticism. There would be large error bars you have to reduce, and you are trying to see a small effect against a large background. At any rate, there would be nothing particularly exciting to look at, just scientists tediously pouring over boring looking spreadsheets of long lists of numbers, arguing over statistics. Jol Thomas was obviously imaging a dramatic scene in a Hollywood block buster movie, with a lot of visual effects showing “black holes leading to higher dimensions”. Obviously Jol Thoms was freaked out by the supposed weirdness of it. From the point of view of physicists, it would be exciting to have the first hints of physics beyond the Standard Model, but ultimately, even if that happened, you would be confirming theoretical predictions, which means that it was predicted by theory, but means that it therefore not “weird” or anything you should be “freaked out” by.
Jol Thoms talked about how SNOLab was built in a meteor crater. He passed around a rock called a “shatter cone” that had been formed in the impact. He also said that when the meteor hit, the Earth day was shorter, and the Earth year was longer, which he cited as proof that “time flows at different rates”. That’s not nonsense. The length of Earth’s day and year has nothing to do with “the rate that time flows”, whatever the hell that means. Jol Thoms also literally admitted that he would barrage physicists with his own crackpot theories. He said, “I would say what if everything was expanding, and if everything was expanding, how would you know, and they would be like…eh…I don’t think so”. This guy Jol Thoms had no idea that the physicist was exasperated at his stupidity, and was exercising enormous self-control to be polite.
I am a physicist and an artist, and I love the intersection of art and physics. I thought the artwork was good. The artists talking afterwards was painful to listen to. Do not believe a word they said. I’m against someone talking about something they know nothing about, and there has never been a more extreme example. I was bracing myself because I knew it was going to be bad, but it was worse than I expected. Both of them had no clue what they were talking but the man was the worst one. From the point of view of a physicist, he was just babbling incoherent gibberish. His knowledge of science was same as the average child in elementary school but he believed that he understood advanced physics. Everything he said and thought was wrong. Every word that came out of his mouth contained infinite wrongness.
Both of them would repeat words and phrases that they heard scientists say, without having the slightest clue what the words mean. Obviously that woman has no idea what a “phonon” is. That man tossed out the phrase “quantum field theory” while having absolutely zero clue what that phrase means. With my knowledge of physics, I could guess what a physicist must have told him which he was very badly misunderstanding, and repeating incorrectly. Some physicist must have told him that we dark matter particles do not interact by electromagnetism, and he misunderstood and thought electrically neutral particles fly through your body or can not be detected. Well, photons are electrically neutral but they don’t fly through your body. Photons, neutrinos, the Z boson, the Higgs boson are all electrically neutral, and we can detect them just fine. It was painful hearing this guy repeat the word “holograph”. Probably some physicist mentioned the holographic principle to him, and he was so stupid, he thought it had something to do with holographs. The worst part was at the end, when he just spewed mentally retarded garbage, saying In China, they will smash particles together which will turn into black holes which then evaporate into a shower particles proving higher dimensions” blah blah blah, it was so bad. How does a human being have that much wrong misunderstanding inside their head? He also apparently thought that dark matter and neutrinos were the same thing. He should have stuck to things he could possibly understand, such as saying that a meteorite hit the area, or that the Indians should have gotten more money.
The woman kept saying “We can’t see dark matter but we know it is there”, and “you can’t see it, touch it, smell it”. Well if you mean we can’t sense it with only your own body, that is equally true for everything else in physics. We build machines and use technology to extend the range of our senses. That’s why Galileo built the telescope. Would she say that we can not “see” the moons of Jupiter because you can’t see them with the unaided eye? Of course we can see the moons of Jupiter. We use a telescope to see them. Similarly, we use the LHC to “see” the Higgs boson. Similarly, we can “see” dark matter in many different ways. Otherwise we would not know that it exists. In 1933, Fritz Zwicky determined that the amount of visible mass in the Coma Cluster would not be enough to keep it together so there must be additional matter. In the 1970s, Vera Rubin studied the rotation curves of galaxies, and realized that they contain a lot more matter than we observe. Today, we have a lot more evidence than that. Today we have overwhelming proof of dark matter from many different sources, from baryon acoustic oscillations to gravitational lensing. All of this begs the question, well what actually is the dark matter? The two leading theories are axions and supersymmetric particles, but neither of these types of particles have been detected, and there are lots of other ideas. The goal of direct detection experiments is to get more information about dark matter particles so we can nail down their identity. Some experiments try to detect the recoil of nuclei after they interact with dark matter. Other experiments try to detect particles that dark matter particles decay into. Other experiments try to produce dark matter particles in accelerators. Of course, there could be more than one type of particle that contributes to what we collectively refer to as “dark matter”. Someone in the audience tried to ask about MOND but that has already been ruled out.
There is nothing mysterious about any of this. It is no different than throughout history, advances in technology enabled us to observe aspects of the Universe that we could not before. Yet, this woman is equally astounded by far more mundane trivial things than dark matter. She kept saying “We are surrounded by infrared radiation but can not see it”. Wait a minute. Infrared light is just part of the electromagnetic spectrum, with wavelength longer than visible. Of course we can see infrared light. You need an infrared camera to see it, but so what? If you are freaked out by something as mundane as light with a different wavelength, how can you talk about dark matter? I do not blame someone if they do not know physics. I do blame someone if they do not know that they do not know physics.
Both the man and the woman spewed anti-white racism. They both used the word “colonialism” to refer to the presence of white people in Canada. I am from the United States, so this is probably far more offensive to me than it is to you since you are probably used to hearing it. An American would be flabbergasted to hear that kind of language. When I first arrived in Canada, and heard the word “colonialism”, I assumed they were referring to Canada being a colony of Britain. Later, I found out they meant something very different. It sounds utterly bizarre when you try to say it in words, but basically they are saying that Canada is a colony of Canada, and therefore Canada should get out of Canada. They are also using the word “colonialism” to refer to the presence of white people in Canada, and therefore white people should get out of Canada. At one point, the man literally said, “Since you people are settlers…” It’s like when the Europeans first arrived in the New World, and established colonies at Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth Rock, they referred to themselves as “settlers”, and therefore, in the year 2021, the Indians sadistically refer to white people today using the word “settlers”. They are somehow claiming that white people do not have the right to live in Canada. Indians in the United States would never use that kind of language. Maybe this is not shocking to you, but from the point of view of an American, this is shocking and offensive.
Here you can read about dark matter.
After the talk, they served refreshments outside. I went to an outdoor area that I had never been to before. It turned out that the only food thety had was fortune cookies, small bags on peanuts, and small homemade paper bags containing almonds. I took all three and left. When I left through the front door, I saw on the the screen on the TV in front of their art gallery, they were playing video of SNOLab that I had previously seen played at TRIUMF. After I that, I went to the Life Building, and got food at Starbucks.
Here is the website about the art exhibit.
https://belkin.ubc.ca/exhibitions/drift-art-and-dark-matter/
10 SEP — 05 DEC 2021
Drift: Art and Dark Matter
An invisible matter is having a gravitational effect on everything. Without the gravity of this “dark” matter, galaxies would fly apart. Observational data in astroparticle physics indicate that it exists, but so far dark matter hasn’t been directly detected. Given the contours of such an unknown, artists Nadia Lichtig, Josèfa Ntjam, Anne Riley and Jol Thoms reflect on the “how” and “why” of physics and art as diverse and interrelating practices of knowledge. Through openness to exchange between disciplines, they have created works that are sensory agents between scientific ideas of dark matter and the exploration of that which has never been directly sensed.
For Drift: Art and Dark Matter, these four artists of national and international stature were invited to make new work while engaging with physicists, chemists and engineers contributing to the search for dark matter at SNOLAB’s facility in Sudbury, two kilometres below the surface of the Earth. The title Drift draws from the mining term for a horizontal tunnel, in this case the hot underground passageway in the copper and nickel mine stretching between the elevator and the clean lab spaces of SNOLAB. The project thereby begins from a reflection on the forms and energies that connect physics to art, labour, landscapes, cultures and histories.
As a complement to the Drift exhibition, the Belkin is collaborating with the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (SBQMI) and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UBC on Ars Scientia, an interdisciplinary research project fusing the praxes of art and science. Beginning in May 2021, Ars Scientia partnered scientists with artists to conduct six-month residencies that explore the potential for academic art-science collaborations. Artists Justine Chambers, Josephine Lee, Khan Lee and Kelly Lycan will work with physicists Rysa Greenwood, Alannah Hallas, Daniel Korchinski, Kirk Madison, Sarah Morris and Luke Reynolds to identify areas of collaborative research in pursuit of both scientific and artistic aims. The residencies will culminate in a research symposium where collaborative findings will be shared, set to take place in November 2021.
Drift: Art and Dark Matter is a residency and exhibition project generated by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute and SNOLAB, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Stonecroft Foundation, George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund and the City of Kingston Arts Fund through the Kingston Arts Council. The project is curated by Sunny Kerr, Curator of Contemporary Art at Agnes Etherington Art Centre. The Belkin gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council, UBC Grants for Catalyzing Research Clusters, and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members.
