“Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.”
—Lise Meitner
Sachiko Kodama: The Art and Science of Ferrofluid
Sachiko Kodama explores within her artwork ‘The Art and Science of Ferrofluid’ the pulsating nature of science and amorphous character of time and space based on the shape of magnetic waves…
The Japanese female artist Sachiko Kodama was born in 1970. As a child she spent a lot of time in the southernmost part of Japan. This area is rich in tropical flowers and plants, edged by the sea, and washed with warm rain. Sachiko loved art and literature from an early age, but also had a strong interest in science.
After Graduating Physics course in the Faculty of Science at Hokkaido University, in 1993, Sachiko matriculated in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Tsukuba, studying Plastic Art and Mixed Media. Then she completed Master’s and Doctoral Program in Art and Design at the University of Tsukuba. She studied Computer and Holography Art in her doctoral research.
‘Ferrofluids appear as black fluid and are made by dissolving nanoscale ferromagnetic particles in a solvent such as water or oil. They remain strongly magnetic even in a fluid condition which makes them more flexible than iron sand.’
Notorious Scientists
Sir William Henry Perkin (1838 – 1907): Hewas an English chemist best known for his discovery, at the age of 18, of the first aniline dye, mauveine.
Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (1844 – 1906): He was an Austrian physicist whose greatest achievement was in the development of statistical mechanics, which explains and predicts how the properties of atoms (such as mass, charge, and structure) determine the visible properties of matter (such as viscosity, thermal conductivity, and diffusion).
Svante August Arrhenius (1859 – 1927): Hewas a Swedish scientist, originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, and one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903. The Arrhenius equation, lunar crater Arrhenius and the Arrhenius Labs at Stockholm University are named after him.
Justus Von Liebig (1803 – 1873): He was a German chemist who made major contributions to agricultural and biological chemistry, and worked on the organization of organic chemistry. He is known as the “father of the fertilizer industry” for his discovery of nitrogen as an essential plant nutrient, and his formulation of the Law of the Minimum which described the effect of individual nutrients on crops.
Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro (1776 – 1856): He was an Italian savant. He is most noted for his contributions to molecular theory, including what is known as Avogadro’s law. In tribute to him, the number of elementary entities (atoms, molecules,ions or other particles) in 1 mole of a substance, 6.02214179(30)×1023, is known as the Avogadro constant.
Foucault Pendulum
Last year when scientists mounted a pendulum above the South Pole and watched it swing, they were replicating a celebrated demonstration performed in Paris in 1851. Using a steel wire 220 feet long, the French scientist Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault suspended a 62-pound iron ball from the dome of the Panthéon and set it in motion, rocking back and forth. To mark its progress he attached a stylus to the ball and placed a ring of damp sand on the floor below.
The audience watched in awe as the pendulum inexplicably appeared to rotate, leaving a slightly different trace with each swing. Actually it was the floor of the Panthéon that was slowly moving, and Foucault had shown, more convincingly than ever, that the earth revolves on its axis. At the latitude of Paris, the pendulum’s path would complete a full clockwise rotation every 30 hours; on the Southern Hemisphere it would rotate counterclockwise, and on the Equator it wouldn’t revolve at all. At the South Pole, as the modern-day scientists confirmed, the period of rotation is 24 hours.
Is time travel possible?
We have been haunted by this question for quite a long time and some of us may have given up by now and reached the conclusion that time travel is something that is only plausible in science-fiction movies and books.
Most of us are familiar with the idea of time travel through movies such as The Time Machine (1960), Déjà Vu (2006) and Star Trek (2009).
But can we actually look at the possibility of traveling through time without breaking the physical laws of our Universe? Will it always be an unanswered question or will we find a way to finally reject or accept a theory of time travel?
Here you can read an interview with theoretical physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies about this matter.
+ watch here the video where theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explores the possibilities of time travel.
