We hope people come away with better understanding of visual interpretation as a mode of critical inquiry and knowledge production, as well as physics.”īoebel and McMaster filmed the process of creating such a visual interpretation from behind the scenes. It is important to understand the possibilities, limitations, and choices already embedded in the visual technology selected to visualize the proton. They involve bringing together different, equally sophisticated modes of making creative discoveries and interpretive decisions. “True art-science collaborations are more complex than science communication or science visualization projects. “The CAST Selection Committee was intrigued by the challenge and saw it as a wonderful opportunity to highlight the process involved in making the animation of the proton as well as the animation itself,” says Leila Kinney, executive director of arts initiatives and of CAST. Credit: Animation courtesy of the “Visualizing the Proton” team “Visualizing the Proton” is an original animation of the proton, intended for use in high school classrooms. They applied for a CAST faculty grant, and the team’s idea started to come to life. Milner “had an intuition that a visualization of their collective work would be really, really valuable,” recalls Boebel of the project’s beginnings. In 2017, Milner was introduced to Boebel and McMaster, who in turn pulled LaPlante on board. It’s almost impossible to convey this without animation,” says Milner. “Essential parts of the physics involve animation, color, particles annihilating and disappearing, quantum mechanics, relativity. Moreover, still renderings of the proton are inherently limited, unable to depict the motion of quarks and gluons. Department of Energy Office of Science - which many MIT faculty, including Milner, as well as colleagues like Ent, have long advocated for. “There’s an enormously strong MIT lineage to the subject,” Milner points out, also referencing the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall of MIT and Richard Taylor of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for their pioneering research confirming the existence of quarks.įor starters, the physicists thought animation would be an effective medium to explain the science behind the Electron Ion Collider, a new particle accelerator from the U.S. It’s a project that Milner and Ent have been thinking about since at least 2004 when Frank Wilczek, the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, shared an animation in his Nobel Lecture on quantum chromodynamics (QCD), a theory that predicts the existence of gluons in the proton.
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