gallery: david kirkby
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| mysteries of a teenage sun |
It’s a snail shell!
It’s a Koosh ball!
It’s physics!
A physicist-photographer
finds cosmic meaning in
everyday things.
By Tona Kunz
Photographs by David Kirkby
Blackboards filled with mathematical equations and scientific
machines as large as cathedrals can awe, and sometimes overwhelm.
But Koosh balls are another matter.
Jiggly, squishy, and abstract, the rubber toy harks back to
carefree childhood days when a Koosh ball could represent a sea
anemone, an alien being, even dark energy, the invisible cosmic
force that repels planets and stars away from one another, stretching
the universe’s like a giant rubber band.
It’s just the sort of approachable object David Kirkby uses
to grab people’s attention and show them the complex and often
abstract world of science.
A physicist and amateur photographer, Kirkby sees artistic
and educational possibilities in everyday objects and the hidden
physics principles they reveal.
“The goal for me is to present little pieces of science that are
not too intimidating and to present images to go with the buzz
words people see in the papers,” Kirkby says. “People have probably
read in the newspaper about dark energy. Taking a picture
of a child’s toy and calling it dark energy makes it less intimidating.
It inspires you to learn more.”
For about two years, Kirkby has been uploading his photographs
to the online gallery flickr.com. A small cache of his photos focuses
on abstract illustrations of physics principles. The collection grew
from his photography hobby and a need to explain physics to
non-physics majors in the lectures and classes he teaches at the
University of California, Irvine.
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| dark energy |
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| spaceship earth |
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| string theory |
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| celestial navigation |
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| inflation |
“The reason I took those pictures and put them on flickr is that
it is almost a form of outreach to get people without a science
background aware of what is going on with physics,” he says.
Everyone, regardless of profession, needs that knowledge. Voters
can’t intelligently choose how to spend their tax dollars, or weigh
in on whether to compete in the global race to the next big discovery,
if they don’t understand the definitions of the landscape, says
Kirkby, who does research with BaBar, the B factory experiment
at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California.
For Kirkby, inspiration comes in two forms.
Sometimes an image is so striking he has to capture it just for
art’s sake, and only later realizes it shows a physics principle. That’s
what happened with the Koosh ball photo, titled “Dark Energy,”
and with an image called “Silk Damping” that shows how plasma,
a gas-like cloud of free electrons, could create ripples in the universe.
“It is almost a form
of outreach to
get people without
a science background
aware of
what is going
on with physics.”
Other times, Kirkby seeks out images that fit scientific principles
he wants to explain, such as the photos “Weak Lensing,” showing
a lens magnifying a word in a book, and “Inflation,” a child blowing up
a balloon. A closeup of a typewriter key containing the 5 and %
characters refers to the percentage of the universe that is visible
matter; it was featured on the cover of the March 2007 issue
of symmetry.
Fans have purchased several of the flickr photographs, which
have garnered 1000 to 6000 hits each, but Kirkby has no intention
of moving from the Internet to a traditional art gallery. “You would
never have that kind of exposure in a bricks-and-mortar show,” he says.
Click here to download the pdf version of this article.
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