The Wake

Art. Science.

These are two words that may seem to be hanging out on opposite sides of the room. Science is a tool for progress based on structure, rules and repeatable results. Art on the other hand takes structure and renders it unrecognizable; twisting rules and exploring the antipodes of expression and meaning. At times they almost seem like unrelated opposites. Many may ask what they have to do with each other. Lately the two have been necking in the corner and many people hope that they go farther. Because they have so much to offer each other. When art and science do hook up, it usually happens away from the crowds.

Up in the attic the little box beeps and boops wildly to the rhythm of tiny particles while different colored lights dance on the walls.

“This file is data from our Barium radioactive source,” says School of Physics and Astronomy Professor Prisca Cushman. “It is what we use to calibrate the detectors.”

In front of her is a wooden box with the dimensions of a milk crate, except a little shorter, sitting on a stack of orange books. Five metal cylinders slightly more narrow than soda cans and about a foot tall each rise out of the box. On each cylinder there is a clear plastic discs about the size of your palm. The whole thing stands no higher than your knee and altogether looks like a model for an apartment complex from the future. This is the Dark Matter Music Box:

Each one of the discs has four differently colored LEDs (light-emitting diode) inside of it: red, blue, yellow and white. Every time a note is produced, the corresponding LED is lit. A light in one of the top discs corresponds to a lower note while a light in the lower discs corresponds to a higher note. When Professor Cushman plays a file, the result is a symphony of synthesized chimes, voices and instruments with a corresponding light show.

The first piece comes out as a hectic smattering of instruments, voices, and lights; not a real distinct rhythm, but a constant barrage of notes. It’s very erratic and wild. The box emits these sounds and sights based on data received by an apparatus called a Cryogenic Dark Matter Search Detector which is kept at near absolute zero temperatures half a mile underground in the Soudan Underground Mine in Northern Minnesota.

The first file is from a calibration test, which means that the researchers themselves “sprayed” the sensors with particles generated by the researchers from a radioactive source.

Deep in the mine where the detector sits, tiny particles like photons and muons are being measured as they smash into the sensors. There, Professor Cushman and physicists from ten different universities, including her lab partner Erik Ramberg are waiting for proof of dark matter to strike the sensor from the heavens above.

Cushman and Ramberg are waiting for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, known as WIMPS, to strike the sensors. These are the theoretical particles which, if measured, would help many physicists sleep a little easier by helping to verify the existence of dark matter. The whole idea of having the sensors deep in the mine, and covered by shielding, is to keep un-wanted particles out so that only the WIMPS can make it through. No one has ever measured one of these particles. The researchers in the mine haven’t seen one yet in the two years they have been looking, but as Professor Cushman says, “We haven’t seen one better than any one else.”

Professor Cushman offers to play another file. She says it is a file created entirely from data without a radioactive source nearby. This piece has a much slower pace. The only particles producing sounds are produced by sub-atomic decay within the shielding. This sub-atomic decay happens all over the universe all the time. Long pauses linger between the hits which sometimes come alone and sometimes in clusters. Soaking in the sights and sounds of the music box, an observer might or might not realize that the music coming out of that box is the music of the cosmos.

To artistically interpret these sounds of the universe, the music box produces a different sound and light depending on the energy, location and type of particles striking the detector. This means that to the properly informed ears and eyes, each sound and light tells you which sensor is hit, how hard each particle hits the sensors and sometimes, what kind of particle it is. Where does an idea like this come from?

“It was really a very collaborative process,” says Professor Cushman.

The brother of a fellow researcher had the idea. Karl Ramberg, a musician and sculptor, was visiting his brother in the mine for a week. He intended to compose a piece based on the physics research in the mine.

“I have always been inspired by the work [my brother] does” Karl says.

Karl Ramberg was hoping to use the piece for a grant and thought that “searching for dark matter in the bottom of an abandoned mine, they would at least look at my proposal… that was when I got the idea to make an instrument that would be triggered by the events that the detector recorded,” he said. During the time that Ramberg was developing a prototype of the instrument he found a program called Artwonk to translate the data into sound. He brought the prototype to his brother and Professor Cushman who decided how the sounds would reflect the particles’ properties

“It turns out that there is a whole genre of music of this nature that I had no clue about,” says Ramberg. “It’s called the sonification of data.” I think that’s a pretty cool idea.

The average person can’t really imagine how a muon travels, or what the size and weight of an electron is compared to the larger and heavier neutron. Someone can say that particles are flying about all the time, but it is difficult to perceive. Those words don’t register in any way that resonates even though particle physics affects the world that we live in.

Sounds are created by decaying particles, the ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bup from the music box is a muon traveling through all the sensors, an electron is quiet because it is so small and light. Through music, a universal human love, these concepts can become something tangible for people.

Instead of explaining some abstract construction of reality with formulas and jargon, an explanation through an artistic creation like the music box becomes an experience of reality in itself. Art presents information in a way that grabs attention. Suddenly, an observer is aware that tiny little objects are flying around and through them right now. Right Now. RIGHT NOW.

As scientific inquiry explores more complex and abstract fields of knowledge, the result can often be too removed from people’s everyday to warrant their concern.

Common models of scientific topics, on the other hand, have been criticized for being oversimplified. Jonah Lahrer points out in Seed magazine, a scientific bi-monthly, that the reductionist approach to science often leaves us with no better, and even some times a more perplexed understanding of our day-to-day existence. He uses the example of neuroscience.

“[Neuro]scientists have reduced our sensations to a set of discrete circuits. And yet, despite this vast material knowledge, we remain strangely ignorant of what our matter creates.”

Human beings have used art to convey emotions and ideas for tens of thousands of years. Why not apply this concept to convey or even advance scientific ideas? Art can have a very visceral and felt effect on our lives. It can elicit strong feelings from us and also give us insight into how we experience existence. Both science and art are ways of understanding, but art is simply a little better at speaking the languageof everyday life.

When you look at a good drawing of a woman’s face, the pencil lines on the paper are no more the woman than the pencil lines of a mathematicians equations of her dimensions are. They both try to represent what we perceive; the pencil drawing just does it in a way that makes more people go, “Damn.”

Of course science has always been a huge help to art as well. Just think of an art medium that you love and try to imagine it without the technologies involved. This is true for everything from cameras to paint.

If you’d like to get a further grasp on this concept, there are plenty of places around the Twin Cities campus you can go explore. The Bell museum has had beautifully painted dioramas up for decades depicting various environmental scenes. Right now it is also hosting an exhibit on climate change that touts collaborations between art and science.

Professor Cushman is trying to get the music box placed into the Science Museum in St. Paul so perhaps in the near future the music box will be there for you to see and hear .

See the Dark Matter Music Box Now!

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A special thanks to Professor Cushman and Karl Ramberg for their help.