Exhibitions

Part 2 of the exhibit is located on the third floor of Varian in SITP

Opened Oct 11th 2022 , following PDK's Physics and Applied Physics Colloquium.

 
Artist Pamela Davis Kivelson
Stanford Q-Farm Artist in Residence
Curated by Peter Michelson, Professor of Physics

A black hole distorts, stretches, and tears apart all matter in its neighborhood, even stars. The underlying mechanism is the strong tidal force exerted by the intense gravitational field of the black hole, which radically distorts spacetime itself. Light bends. Even Light cannot escape the intense gravity of a black hole. Using Pamela Davis Kivelson’s art as input, Biao Lian, and Ruizhu Chen plotted black hole orbits in order to reveal the ways in which multimedia works and paintings of astronomical size would get distorted, break apart, and disintegrate in the vicinity of a black hole. Part of the painting spirally falls into the black hole, while the rest picks up enough energy to escape the black hole. What you see is what happens to these paintings as they are rotated and distorted over time. They are the product of elemental forces. These orbits have an additional temporal component - the images are surprising snapshots of the transformations wrought by the black hole. Sagittarius A*, an astronomical object at the center of our (Milky Way) galaxy that was identified by the research groups of Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez as a supermassive black hole. For this discovery, they were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Sir Roger Penrose. Though the viewer is only nominally aware of the original painting or drawing, that awareness is still creating a sly presence. The orbiting motion transforms.

Other Collaborators include, Roger Blanford, Shamit Kachru, Laimei Nie, Sir Steve Cowley, Linn Cary Mehta, and  Henry Hirschel, Angel Ortiz, Yuqing Chen, Harry Chen, Laurence Nedelec, Zhaoyu Han, Sirui Ning.