Fundamental to science and art, says Edward Tufte, is “intense seeing,” or seeing without the use of words. Widely known for his graphical depictions of statistical data, Tufte uses intense seeing to discover the meaning of large amounts of information, which he then shares by crafting elegant designs to represent that data. Feynman diagrams do much the same, says Tufte, who has been interested in Feynman diagrams for decades. First created by Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman in the 1940s, each diagram conveys the space-time paths of subatomic particles and represents the organization of pages of mathematical work.
This set of 32 Feynman diagrams was used in a calculation of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon in a 2012 paper by Tatsumi Aoyama, Masashi Hayakawa, Toichiro Kinoshita, and Makiko Nio, and cast in stainless steel by Edward Tufte. The image has had black and white reversed to give a ghostly glow of the ever-changing shadows on the wall. Image courtesy of Andy Conklin (Yale University, New Haven, CT).
The scientific action of Feynman diagrams is at the vertices, explains Tufte, “so it’s just like in typography: if you get the line’s curve and where they change course right, then the letter will read properly.” With that same flexibility in Feynman diagrams, Tufte could vary the lengths of the subatomic particles’ paths, which are represented in the sculptures by straight and squiggly lines.
The sculptures are made of stainless steel “and air,” Tufte says, and are mounted about 10 cm off the wall to allow them to cast shadows of varying colors and intensity based on the various light sources. As the observer moves, the shadows move in relation to the sculpture, simultaneously suggesting quantum theory’s uncertainty regarding the actual paths of subatomic particles. “With multiple lights, you get multiple shadows,” says Tufte.
First on display at Tufte’s gallery in New York City, Tufte’s exhibit “The Cognitive Art of Richard Feynman” opened mid-April at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Illinois. “The wonderful thing about going there,” says Tufte, “was these people use [Feynman diagrams] every day.” Coincidentally, some of the sculptures represented experiments currently underway at Fermilab, which both resonated with the physicists at the exhibit’s opening and prompted their careful examination of the sculptures for scientific accuracy. Of the hundreds of sculptures representing around a thousand vertices, two vertices caught the attention of at least one physicist. Tufte recalls him asking, ‘What’s that miracle that’s taking place there?’
“It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of a mistake described as a ‘miracle,’” Tufte laughs. Those two vertices lacked the expected representation of an emitted photon, but “it may not be a mistake,” says Tufte—ever the perfectionist—unless the published work of diagrams Tufte says he used as templates for his sculptures was also in error.
Tufte’s exhibit was on display at Fermilab and included Tufte’s “Interplanetary Explorer”—an Airstream trailer adorned with emblematic Feynman diagrams—as well as Feynman’s own van on which Feynman himself drew his diagrams. “There’s five-hundred pounds of metal on the outside that make it interesting,” Tufte quips about the van, “but the other seven-thousand pounds are a disaster of automaking.”
Of his own art, Tufte says most of his is abstract, but that this exhibit is representative art because the sculptures are “a representation of an abstract thing.” Having enjoyed the experience of exhibiting at Fermilab, Tufte hopes next to take the exhibit to the European Center for Nuclear Research in Switzerland.
