What Sort of Unobserveabillity?

Still

Stiller

Stillest

Subtle differences are caught in these stills , taken from a new short animation. I wanted its layers of almost invisible crochet to look like a globe, the stills are little lunar. Mostly though, it reminded me of the smallest drop of a sample under a microscope, in a Petri dish or on a slide. Clean ,crystaline and pure. Is it a cure? Is it a clone... No its CROCHET! The answer to everything.

I will make a link to the film as soon as its down loaded, it will take a week with my slow connection! Thanks once again to Jake Whittaker, editorial white giant, (www.jacobwhittaker.co.uk.) as usual.

Are the formations in these aqua circles, a clue to the nature of the mythical ring of blue light ,thought in certain parts, to summon an instant cloaking device in cases of extreme need. Could that legendary covering of blue magic, actually be made of crochet as well ?

Screaming Dark Matter

Make the stairs go away... or does the crochet dissappear?

Lost in the sky, but getting bigger.

From `Blink`by Rebecca E. Marshall, part of the `Ways to Dissappear` exhibition.

Suddenly I realised his pattern held a message,

something wordless clicked into place, an understanding.

When I closed my eyes I could see the same pattern

in the blackness.

Open close, open close.

Blinking I dissappeared.

Dark matter . Matter in our universe is out weighed by a factor of 6 to 7 by invisible cold dark matter. So says Marcus Chown, ( He and Phillip Ball are two of my favorite popular science writers.) in the New Scientist this week. Issue number 2722, page 38.

`The idea of working with the unobservable is not foreign to modern science.`- Melivin Bragg, In Our Time.

Cold dark matter doesn`t react with light, so we can`t see it. That doesn`t mean its not there... or is it?

Either Dark Matter, or Newtons calculations about gravity were incorrect. Lawks! That`ll put the cat amoungst the pidgeons.

I Spy,With My Little Eye Something Beginning With... i

Floral Division

Chrysanthumum Math

Finding beauty in symetry, is apparently down to the human brain finding symetrical images quicker to process. This could explain the general fashionable consesus, that natural is beautiful, symetry is simple, which is a type of beauty . Although our contemporary aesthetic taste has become more sophisticated, art may have begun with human ritual emulating the symetrical beauty in nature by trying to reproduce and then embelish it .

Religious art often expresses or depicts the beauty found in miracle. Whether with representational images or in the allagory of pattern , where symetry is abundant.

Scottish philosopher David Hume, defines a miracle as `violation of the laws of nature... a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent`.

Most of the stuff our universe is made of is invisible. Thats not to say it`s not there. Scientists

can neither see nor find it, but they attempt to describe it with the symetry found in equation.. They can`t find `God` (for want of a better term) either. Maybe `He` is wearing a the invisible metamaterial made of nanofibres thats mentioned in a previous blog. I wonder if the cloak is crocheted in a symetrical pattern.

`Belief in miricles need not be inconsistant with an acceptance of science.`

(Professor Hugh McLachlan)

Invisibility isn`t.

This is a picture taken by the NASA Spitzer telescope. It is 50 million light years away.



Thats 50,000,000 x 5,878,630,000,000 international miles. 289,381,500,000,000 miles.



Although I worked this out with info from Wikki and the calculator on my phone , so it`s accuracy is dubious.

In the centre the white dot is a monstrously huge Black Hole. It has a mass of about 10 million of our suns. The Black Hole at the centre of our galaxy has only a few million solar masses, puney by comparison. The fuzzy blue dot on the left is a companion galaxy nestled in the arms of its giant galactic mate.

Information like this makes my head spark up with positon charged butterflies. It`s beyond beautiful to me. Totally inspirational, and wonderous to see what our universe is made from.

If you want to see The Black Hole of Carmarthen`, a piece crocheted in 2006 go to http://www.birdlouise.co.uk/ there are photos and a link to a short documentary film about the piece. It`s also in the sister blog www.eventhorizon-theproject.bolgspot.com.

Cosmic String or String Theory

Swallow on the line, picture by Jacob Whittaker

`It was a lovley day: shires-long of pearled cloud undercloud, with a grey stroke underneath marking each row.`
Gerard Manley Hopkins 23rd July 1874

Beautiful, almost invisible and deadly.

Cosmic string is not String theory. Cosmic string, I read is, a one dimensional (!!!), topological
defect, that appears in various fields of space time. A line 1.6 km long is heavier than the earth. Weighty thread. Next, I need to find some scales to work out the relative weight (in planets) of a crochet hook needed to cope with this cosmic string. I suppose that the hook will have to be one dimensional as well. What IS one dimensional ? I find that even harder to get my head around than multi-dimensional. Maybe, that should read, What is ONE dimensional? Or maybe just WHAT?

In case any one is wondering, Jesus has returned to his former minute size. Watch this blog for experiment two.

Where To Find a Higgs Boson?

Rest in Peace Harry Patch.

Pale and interesting
I rescued some pure silk chiffon I had printed by lazer, gave it a wash and ironed it. It`s very pretty, unfortunately in small pieces now. They may be worth filming in the breeze for a whimsical experiment. Diaphanous Alexander Calder. On a domestic level wouldn`t they make nice curtains?
For more pictures of the fabric.
www.flickr.com/photos/birdlouise

Neil Dawson, Horizons (1994).

Neil Dawsons Enormous ` Horizons`, is owned by Alan Gibbs, and is part of a collection of sculptures found on his farm in New Zeland. The other pieces are by contemporary big names including as Anish Kapoor, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra. Fab.

All the sculptures are the largest pieces ever commission by each artist. There is an article in this months Art World magazine about the farm and its stupendous collection. Well worth a look.

Dawsons is my favorite, looking like a 2D outline of a Litchenstein print, with out the need of a speech bubble to say `Oh my gosh!`. Made from steel , with the levity of a celestial counterpane it occupies for an eon what should be only a moments shake. Fabricated to frame the heavens, but anchored to the earth. Incredible, and as with many great pieces of art a little humbleing. Never full of nothing.

Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple: on ne voit bien qu`avec la coer. L`essentail est invisible pour les yeux.

From The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery.

And now here is my secret. A very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Universal Nothingness

Victorian Quilt

Quilt Bones (crochet, so far 66 cm squareish).
Traditional Welsh Quilt

I was really pleased to be at the opening of the Jen Jones Quilt Centre , in Lampeter, deepest darkest West Wales.
Not just because I love quilts, and this is only part of her magnificent collection, but because Lampeter is a quiet town, despite the university, its a bit `out of the way`, and the quilt centre is the perfect craft and culture attraction. For a few more photos of quilts,

www.flickr.co./photos.birdlouise

The patterns that form the quilts are sewn in tiny running stitches, drawing contours that defined a womens status, and kept the family warm. I am constanly reminded of the Germain Greer quote that called womens tradtional crafts `Heroic pointlessness`. Food for thought.

Blaise Pascal...

`The eternel silence of those infinite spaces fills me with dread.`

Also thinking, of course, about the gaps between the stitches, the no- stitch. The other . What Newtoinian physics in science, called the Ether, the measurement of time and space made on an invisible graph of only three dimensions. `We` now know the gaps between sub atomic particles to be filled with electro- magentic waves and gravity at the least. The concept of vacuum defunct, and upodated with space time incessentness, if there is such a word. I wonder if Pascal would have found these new scientific theories some kind of mental comforter, a quilt for his dread.

Space is filled with connectivity. The vast majority of which is invisible . Some of which is undetectable. Anti-Quilt , crochet loops of an invisible conducter.