Invisible forces create art
They may look like something painted by Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt a hundred years ago but these beautiful images represent invisible forces.
The Weird Fields contest is part of a US undergraduate course on electricity and magnetism run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The course encourages students to use a special computer program that converts mathematical formulae into visual representations of electromagnetic fields.
The resulting swirls, loops, circles and squares, while not necessarily corresponding exactly to those occurring in nature, offer a creative way to understand some of the most abstract concepts in physics.
"The visualisation kind of brings the equations into the real world," says student George Zaidan, whose winning image was chosen by his classmates, and then framed and hung in the MIT Museum along with other works of art.
The contest is part of MIT's Technology-Enabled Active Learning Project, which moves physics learning out of the passive environment of large lecture halls where students copy notes from a professor's chalkboard scribbles and into a studio classroom where small groups of students use laptop computers to interact with each other, the instructors and computer simulations.
"If you get people to interact with you ... you get a better learning outcome," says Professor of physics John Belcher, who teaches the course and runs the annual competition.
Invisible forces and vector fields
Interacting is key when trying to grasp such notions as vector fields. Understanding the invisible forces present in vector fields is important to comprehending almost everything in nature, from storm systems to sitting in a chair.
The jet stream, for example, is a vector field and the many arrows often used to characterise motion within it are the vectors.
But there are other, less obvious, vector fields, such as those that interact when you sit in a chair.
You may think your rear-end is contacting the seat, but in reality it's the vector electric fields created by atoms in both your backside and the chair that are interacting.
"The matter in your body literally never touches any other matter; it is only the fields that interact," Belcher says.
Understanding that requires some serious visualisations. That's where Belcher's class and, ultimately, the Weird Fields competition come in.
"This contest makes them more aware of how you can take the maths and generate a visual," says Assistant Professor Carolann Koleci of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, who studies how physics students learn best.
In the competition, students use a Java applet developed by Mesrob Ohannessian, a graduate student in MIT's Center for Educational Computer Initiatives, to manipulate the direction and strength of each vector at a point in space.
To do this, they enter two equations: one that represents the horizontal component of the vector field and one that represents the vertical component.
The program then produces a visual representation of that field, and art blooms.
The contest is restricted to students, but anyone can download the Java applet and create their own weird fields.
Zaidan encourages it, if only for the sake of fiddling around with the formulas to see what beautiful picture emerges.