The Dark UniverseMaking Science Intimate in the New Data Culture

Roger F MalinaAstrophysicist

Art Journal EditorArt-Science Researcher

The Narrative This Afternoon• Why many astronomers are unhappy today

•The discovery of dark matter in the universe • The realization that human beings are very badly designed to understand the universe. • How this idea applies to other understandings

• The coming data culture•Soon your cell phone will know as much as you do

• How artists can help make data intimate • The new “Leonardo”s

Some Confessions• My Disturbed Childhood • My Disturbed Career and Professional Life

• My Beliefs • I am a positivist, scientific realist • I am an Atheist

• But I believe that science is only one valid way of knowing• That the ethics of curiosity determines the direction and content

of current science at a given time• That we must combine ‘ways of knowing”– eg art and science

• We must embed science in our communities – open science

My Disturbed ChildhoodFrank Malina, …….Kinetic Artist

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Frank Malina, Research Engineer

A student project !!90 km in 1946The First Successful high altitude rocket

Frank Malina research engineer

● My father led the team that launched the first object into outer space

● 1949 Reached 400 Kilometers as second stage to captured V2

● Co founder and first director NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, co founder Aerojet General

My Father was an art-science Hybrid

Second Generation Rocketeer

I led the NASA team that build the Extreme

Ultraviolet Observatory1992

Third Generation Rocketeer: Yuri Malina 2008

My Disturbed Career•Physics and Optics•Astrophysics• Editor of Art Publication “Leonardo’ since 1982•Art-Science Researcher

•Today I lead a research lab that creates both art and science at the same time

•Astronomers, Neurobiologists, Geoscientists •Composers, Artists, Sound Artists….and secret poets

We are creating Data Stethoscopesand Data Forests

• https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B3O03gcq-sQeeGsxU29ZUlRhUzA

Visual and Aural Mathematics see Michele Emmer, Visual Mind AlsoLinda Henderson 4th Dimension in Art

Leonardo Books14

My Career in Science

– Director NASA EUVE Astronomy Observatory

– Director Observatory Marseille Provence

– Telescope Development– Data Analysis….BIG DATA– Satellite Operations– Cosmology Group

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The Leonardo Organisations

• My Career in Art

• Promoting and documenting the interactions of the arts, sciences and new technologies.

• Scientists deeply engaged in the arts and humanities

• Artists Seeking to appropriate science and technology for cultural purposes

• Scholars studying the interaction of the arts, sciences and technology

Hybrid teams

Why many astronomers are unhappy and embarrassed today

Big Data Transition in AstronomyFrom one galaxy at a time To 450 million at a time

What happened to Astronomy after it entered the big data era ?

• We discovered that 95% of the content of the universe is dark

• It emits no light of any kind• It is of an un-known nature

–Dark Matter–Dark Energy

• We have moved from a world of data scarcity to a world of data plenty

• 1992: Historian Daniel Boorstin:

• 150 years ago: • Meaning rich and data poor

• Today : • Data rich and meaning poor.

• « Epistemological Inversion »• Cf Copernican Revolution• A new Phenomenology• New data experts will be artists,

designers and humanists

We underestimate how our nature impacts what we know and can know• Einstein:

•“The universe of ideas is just as independent of the nature of our experience as clothes are of the form of the human body”

• Varela: •All knowledge is conditioned by the structure of the knower

• Stelarc and his “third arm”:

Modern Science Doesnt Make Common Sense• Most knowledge about our

world now comes through scientific instruments and data not directly to the senses

• Most of the world is’nt on human “scales”

• Our intuition, languages, metaphors, are built training on the wrong data

• analogous change in culture ?

Arrhenius 1896 On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the

Ground

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By the 1970s CO2 increase measured

Katherine Morizaki: Inside Outside Handbag

Are we becoming a data culture ?• The Stone Age• The Bronze Age• The Iron Age

• Will the Antropocene be the data age ?• We can only study the universe with big

data• We only know about climate change

because of big data

A Data Culture ?Big Data Raises Many Cultural questions

• In Astronomy we know that most of the content of the universe is dark

• Does not emit light of any kind • By analogy• As we Enter a Data Culture, much

knowledge will not be accessible to our senses

• The crucial role of art science hybridity to translate data to sensory experience

• Artists Making Data Intimate• Artists • Making Science Intimate • Big Data poses problems

– Many important things in our societies are not yet in big data

– Many things will never be in big data

– DARK CULTURE ? That can never be in data

one antarctic nightrobotic astronomical telescope in antarctica

Making Science Intimate: Artist Marcel-li in Zero Gravity

A comment on Professional Hybrids:……………………………………. T shaped and “Pi” Shaped

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Contemporary Hybrids

Francois-Joseph LapointePhD Molecular Biology and Phd Dance

Carl DjerassiPhD Organic Chemistry, Novelist/Playwright

Hybrid Collaborations• String Theorist Lisa Randall• Collaboration with Composer

Hector Parra and Multi-media artist Matthew Richie

• Hypermusic; A Projective Opera in Seven Planes

• Premiered Centre Pompidou• « Translating the world of

theoretical physics in a way that appeals to scientists »

A final idea: The danger of framing metaphors

In the Tree of KnowledgeThe Two Cultures Metaphor

Changing our Metaphors as we enter the Data Culture

Art Science Collaboration to Make Science and Data Intimateand make the careers of hybrid professionals possible

Thank You and See you in Space