Science Can Be a Beautiful Thing : Art Is in the Eye of the Beholder. Well, Behold All This Sci-Art and Judge for Yourself.

On the rooftop of the sprawling Moscone Conference Center in San Francisco, a courtyard-sized cloud floats quietly, waiting for a whisper of wind to whip it into an interesting shape.

This is no ordinary cloud--no visitor dropping in from a passing weather front. Instead, it is a sculpture--a work of art. The cloud condenses into existence from billions of tiny water droplets exhaled from a circle of nozzles that spit a fine spray of city water into the courtyard. At first encounter, it looks like smoke billowing out of a volcano, hot and dangerous. But it’s cool and friendly, like a shadow on a hot day.

“The weather appears really calm today,” says the cloud’s creator, artist Ned Kahn. “You’d swear there was no wind.”

His cloud proves otherwise. At the slightest unseen prodding, it morphs into almost lifelike figures, climbing up a concrete courtyard wall, swirling around corners, creeping along the ground and up the stairs, twirling into a vortex like a spiral staircase, and just as rapidly disappearing. It leaves behind cool, moist patches, cloudprints on the cement.

It’s not every day one finds oneself nose to nose with a cloud, so one tends to pay attention. And that’s the point. Kahn likes to pull people into what he calls “cloud time”--a state of observing far too settled to fit into the noisy chaos of everyday life. “At times I have the patience to do something like that, it’s been an incredible experience. Most people never have the time.”

Certainly it’s natural to wonder at clouds, and many artists find the muse in quiet contemplation of nature. But this artist is also a scientist of sorts. He knows that the cloud embodies equations that repeat endlessly in nature--in rivers of water, currents of electricity, swirls of stars in galaxies--even, possibly, waves of thought.

“It seems so intuitively obvious to me how a flow likes to organize itself,”he says. The water droplets, like the stars, are all essentially the same. “But when you get a lot of things that are the same together, you get these emergent properties. When things are flowing, they spontaneously organize.”

It boggles his mind, for example, how highly structured galaxies form out of flowing rivers of stars. Galaxies can pass right through each other, more or less intact, the stars within them held together tenuously over vast distances only by gravity. “How can one star know what another star is doing?” he asks.

If stars, like water droplets, are much the same, then where do the intricate patterns come from?

The questions artist Kahn asks are at the forefront of numerous fieldsof science--from the study of the universe to the study of earthquakes, weather,human consciousness and heart attacks. The National Science Foundation thinks so strongly of Kahn’s contributions that it recently granted nearly a million dollars for what amounts to a retrospective of his work.

Called “The Turbulent Landscape: The Forces That Shape Our World,” the exhibit is scheduled to open in June at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Scattered among garden paths and running water, several dozen works of art will showcase the evolution of natural forms, from sand piles to vortexes. Fluids, pendulums and fabric will wave, spin, ripple, erode, vibrate and merge under the competing influences of gravity and molecular forces.

In the meantime, a different sort of partnership between art and science is blooming at UCLA, where artist Pamela Davis presides over an arts center in the physics building. Officially an artist-in-residence at the university’s College of Letters and Science, Davis teaches courses to undergraduates in tandem with physicists and mathematicians. Last spring, an exhibit of student work included a drum composition based on the Fibonacci number series--a kind of natural multiplication that directs the growth of seashells, sunflowers and snails. The student, an English and Latin major, played drums in a rock band. His piece throbbed with a subtle crescendo that sounded a little like the stealthy unfolding of spring.

Another student, a biochemistry major, created a picture/word piece on people’s reactions to images of DNA. Depending on who was looking at the images, he found, “DNA looked like everything. A physics major thought it was a stellar interaction.”

Davis’ show, “Physics Art”--a collection of painting and sculpture--has appeared at the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry as well as at UCLA, and at least one of Davis’ works is slated for the Garden of Complexity. But where Kahn runs on cloud time, Davis operates on a frantic fast-forward. Where Kahn is contemplative, Davis digs furiously for clues to the fundamental nature of things. Where Kahn collaborates with geophysicists, Davis hangs out with mathematicians or theoretical (“mathematical”) physicists. Where Davis is attracted to the hidden symmetries beneath the surface, Kahn concentrates on the rich embroidery that displays itself for all to see.

Their “signature” pieces say it all. Kahn’s is a tornado made out of mist produced by the same machine that rains fine spray over the produce in the local Safeway. It rises like a genie out of a bottle and twists seductively until someone or something disturbs it, then it evaporates into invisibility like a ghost. It is also becoming ubiquitous, having appeared at the Kennedy Center in Washington, the World Financial Center in New York, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and the Weizmann Institute for Science in Israel. It has even been on tour with Laurie Anderson (she composed “tornado music” for it, says Kahn).

Davis’ best-known creation, by contrast, is the soliton--a queer, solitary wave that was once considered impossible (in a sense, it is a wave that doesn’t wave). Rather than undulating like ordinary waves, solitons slide along as unchanging blips--like a lump going down the throat. Studied for decades primarily as an abstract mathematical entity, solitons today are used to send messages through fiber optic cables. They’ve also been proposed as a kind of elementary particle, and even as an exotic variety of star.

Both Kahn and Davis see themselves as artists, strongly attracted to the insights of science. To some extent, they are at home in both worlds, and neither.

*

Science and art may seem unlikely partners, but they have been cohabiting as long as humans have been trying to make sense of the world around them. Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t the only scientist with a great feeling for art; the history books are full of examples, as are countless contemporary studios and labs.

Chemist Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, a Nobel laureate, writes poems about molecules and recently published a book with artist Viviane Torrence that is a joint collection of his essays and her collages. Tom Stoppard’s second major play based on physics--”Arcadia”--is a smash hit in New York. Artist Ken Snelson has been exploring the structure of matter in his paintings and sculptures for dozens of years. Mathematician Nat Friedman of the State University of New York at Albany, who is also a sculptor, hosts an annual meeting on math and art, attended by top people in both fields. And just last year, a couple of touring mathematicians put on a show at Cal State San Bernardino called “Two Guys Dancing About Math.”

Robert Root-Bernstein--a physiologist who was one of the first MacArthur “genius” fellows and has written many books and articles about art and science--cites psychological tests that find scientists and artists to be much more similar to one another than to other professionals such as merchants or lawyers.

Physicist Frank Oppenheimer felt so strongly about the importance of art that he made it the central part of the Exploratorium when he opened the now-world-renowned science museum in the early 1970s. (Oppenheimer’s mother was a painter, and he was an avid flute and piccolo player.)

Located in San Francisco’s grandiose Palace of Fine Arts, the Exploratorium “opened” more or less accidentally in 1972, as people strolling through the adjacent park wandered into the cavernous structure. “In the beginning, artists would come to explore the acoustics of the building,” says Pete Richards, the artist who runs the museum’s artist-in-residence program. “Then word got out among San Francisco artists that there was this weird guy in the Palace of Fine Arts who would let you play around.”

A pivotal piece, says Richards, was Bob Miller’s ethereal “Sun Painting.” Starting with an ordinary light beam, Miller’s piece uses prisms and mirrors to tease out the individual strands of color and re-weave them into continually changing tapestries of startling beauty and complexity.

The late poet Muriel Rukeyser became so entranced with Miller’s work that she wrote a poem, called “The Sun Painter,” about it during a stint as writer-in-residence. Neurologist/author Oliver Sacks is also a regular visitor--pulled in by the extraordinary works of a North Beach buddy of Miller, Franco Magnani, who obsessively painted a childhood home in Italy that he hadn’t seen in more than 40 years.

Today the Exploratorium is nearly as well known for its art programs as for its science. Four years ago, the National Science Foundation awarded $250,000 for works of environmental art at the museum; more recently, it gave nearly $1 million for “Turbulent Landscape.” The grants, says Richards, mean “that NSF recognized that artists an do good science; they recognized that artists are discovering things that are important to know.”

Oppenheimer liked to say that artists and scientists are the official “noticers” of society, the ones who observe things other people have learned to ignore, or never been taught to see. Their job is to say to the rest of us, “Hey, look at this!” “This” could be a flower, a look exchanged between lovers, an interesting crystal, the track of an unseen particle, an unexpected solution to an equation.

The wiry, eccentric physicist made a perfect mentor for young Kahn. “As a kid, I spent endless hours in the woods, looking at streams, staring at things.”

The man still looks rather like a mischievous cherub, his halo of dark curls contrasting oddly with the traces of yesterday’s beard and his baggy shorts and sneakers placing him closer to 12 than 30-something. (These days, he takes his own two kids along when he needs a cover for dubious adult activities like staring into manholes.)

Kahn majored in biology at the University of Connecticut and took courses in physics and chemistry. “I realized it was pretty boring,” he says. “It was mostly analyzing data.”

He thought about being an architect, until he realized that, too, would be “1% creativity, 99% haggling with contractors and clients.” When he chanced into the Exploratorium after college, he quickly signed on as a self-described “scumbag” in the shop--building exhibits like a giant soap film “painting” for a show on the math and physics of bubbles. “I got interested in the flow patterns, so I took courses at Berkeley in fluid mechanics.”

He also spent a lot of time with Oppenheimer. “I had all these questions about the physical world, and he’d blow off his meetings and we’d spend the afternoon together. And it usually ended up with him saying, ‘We don’t know that.’ So I got interested in the limits to science.”

Take a pendulum, says Kahn. “Its simple predictability is the first thing you learn in physics.” That’s why we make clocks from it. “But if you put a few of them together, you get something you can’t predict.”

His work “Chaotic Pendulum” followed closely on the “Soap Film Painting.” The simple skeleton of five aluminum “arms” jointed loosely together, when spun, becomes lifelike in the complexity of its behavior. Like the stars in galaxies, the water droplets in a cloud and the atoms that make up living things, complexity breathes unpredictable life into what scientists used to think of as predictable forms.

His experience at the Exploratorium, says Kahn, “was the kind of learning you can’t forget. I took physics in college and it was just learning a formula to pass an exam. I’ve gone back to some of the stuff I struggled with in college, and now it’s miraculous. A simple equation gives rise to this incredible, magical thing.”

The tornado is a good example. During his research on vortexes, Kahn paid a visit to the tornado lab of atmospheric scientist John Snow at Purdue University “He created this room with rotating walls,” says Kahn. “It would create this huge rotating air mass; it was all computer controlled. He’d inject antifreeze to make it visible, scatter laser light off it so he could quantify images.” In other words, says Kahn, the scientist’s focus is on getting rid of extraneous influences that might muddy experimental results. For Kahn, the muddying influences are the central point.

“With science, you have to focus on one layer,” he says. For him, the layers of complexity are curtains that keep revealing new realms. The 8-foot-tall Exploratorium tornado, for example, changes form depending on which doors are open in the museum, who’s standing in front of it, reaching in to touch it, or even climbing into the center. (A big disappointment was the tornado that appeared at the Kennedy Center in Washington; the architecture of the hall was so dull that the tornado just stood there.)

Kahn’s “Turbulent Orb” also presents a level of complexity far beyond what a scientist can readily handle in a lab or equation. The piece, which UC Berkeley geophysicist Raymond Jeanloz describes, not incorrectly, as “that globe of detergent,” is actually two glass globes, one inside the other, with a viscous blue fluid in the space in between. It looks like a planet on a pedestal. When spun, the planet’s “atmosphere” swirls into bands and eddies eerily reminiscent of Jupiter. According to Jeanloz, the globe is a model for the goings-on at the center of our own planet. “We think there are similar currents formed where the Earth’s outer core meets the mantel.” Those fluid motions are the source of Earth’s sometimes erratic magnetic field.

But scientists, says Jeanloz, tend to jump so quickly past the “in your face” patterns to the underlying equations that they may forget about them entirely. “We’re still occupied with the behind-the-scenes intangible entities--like forces--that allow us to describe very complex phenomena. But not everything is describable by simple formulas.”

Kahn’s work, in contrast, “jumps out at you; all of a sudden, you have a newway of thinking, a new result.” On some level, Jeanloz feels, Kahn’s work has had a similar impact to the first-ever supercomputer simulations of the Earth’s core, completed by scientists last year. “I don’t mean to say his exhibit has the same value as two years of work by our colleagues,” he says, “but it is remarkable how just seeing something with your own eyes can have such an impact. To simulate [the flow patterns in Kahn’s ‘Orb’] would be daunting, perhaps impossible, even with state-of-the-art computing. . . . Sometimes, after an encounter with Ned, I get the feeling that I got more out of him than he got out of me.”

Another scientist fan of Kahn’s is Robert Pincus, now a “cloud physicist” at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, whose scientific interest was sparked during a post-college stint as an apprentice in the Exploratorium shop. “We’re both fascinated by the same kinds of things--fluid motion, the complexity of pattern,” Pincus says. “I’ve taken endless hours of fluid mechanics, but I do my job because it’s beautiful. Ned distills in his pieces exactly the kinds of things that make me stop and look.” Where Kahn’s aesthetic moves him to mess around with motors or fog or sand, Pincus’ research pulls him in an opposite direction. “My reaction is: How can I squeeze this data until I abstract what’s happening here?

“I look at clouds. That’s my job. But mostly I look at a computer and curse.” Scientists often concentrate on extracting the invisible underlying rules that govern the complicated patterns; Kahn makes the invisible visible by making the complexity tangible. “Clouds just make visible what the wind is doing in the upper atmosphere,” says Kahn. “All that pattern is formed out of something you can’t see. I try so hard, and nature just does it naturally.” That’s one reason Kahn relies on the behavior of real clouds, fog, wind, vortexes and pendulums to lead the way. “My imagination is more limited than the phenomenon. The phenomenon is real; it does its own thing. When you’re imagining, you’re limited by what you know.” Sometimes he needs a scientist to tell him what he’s created. Kahn’s “Aoelian Landscape” is a wild landscape of glass bead sand dunes in a roughly 3-foot-diameter desert. Wind from a small movable fan sculpts the dunes; the shapes of the dunes, in turn, direct the wind’s course. “So there is feedback, which is the hallmark of complexity,” says Kahn. What he didn’t expect, however, were the avalanches. It took an in-house Exploratorium physicist Paul Doherty to explain what was happening.

As you watch “Aeolian Landscape,” a sedate mound of sand will crack like an eggshell, and a chunk will drop away like a trapdoor. Or a section of solid sand might suddenly melt and drool down the side. The avalanches flow uphill as well as down; they flutter in continuous streams or come and go in an instant. The same patterns repeat over and over, but never predictably.

In the scientific parlance, such events are controlled by nonlinear processes. “I love to see these people who wrote all the great papers on nonlinear physics, standing around the tornado, noticing things,” says Kahn. “I really enjoy getting people who really know the stuff to look at it and just free associate.”

Recently, he had the pleasure of watching some astronomers contemplate the birth of double stars in a prototype exhibit called “Whirlpool” that is getting a test run in the Exploratorium. It’s a mystery to astronomers why double stars are so common; our solitary sun, in fact, is an oddity in the sky. Most stars have companions. But why?

For the exhibit, a ring of neon lights casts a purple glow on water in a circular tub with a central drain. At regular intervals, a pulse of water squirts out from pipes on opposite sides of the circular sink. Just like the water draining from a bathtub, it forms into a vortex.

But the vortex is slightly off center. It begins to orbit the drain. As it closes in on the center, it orbits faster and faster, then breaks off. Where there was one vortex, now there are two--like two dancers spinning around with joined hands, then suddenly spinning so fast that they are pulled apart. Some theories have it that stars form in the same way from collapsing clouds of cosmic dust that are drawn into a central vortex by mutual gravity. And Kahn loves these connections.

Recently, when the Hubble Space Telescope produced images of stars being born out of stellar egg clouds--images reproduced by almost every newspaper and TV station--Kahn thought, “I’ve seen that!”

After the “Turbulent Landscape”show, Kahn plans to leave the Exploratorium, where he has been anchored for more than 10 years, to try making it on his own. “I guess I need a rich benefactor,” he says, then immediately recognizes the flaw in this plan. Rich benefactors like paintings to hang on their walls, not fickle clouds that can fly like the wind--leaving no capital gains for the benefactor’s investment.

Besides, Kahn’s art is actively, intensely public. Not only did he put a cloud atop the Moscone center, he built a greenhouse filled with fog and color at the San Francisco County Jail--with the help of inmates. His fondest wish is to create a “cloud conservatory.” He’s working on a proposal to build one at the Oakland Observatory, which was badly damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and now has funds for restoration. People would sit in reclining chairs and view the sky through frame-like windows. “Of course, all these things hang by a thread,” he says, “even in the best of circumstances--and it’s not a good time for public art.” A project to design a new terminal for San Francisco’s airport fell apart after two years of work. The cloud observatory, however, appears to be doing fine. “This will be my place to get people into cloud time.”

*

Cloud time is a precious commodity in Pamela Davis’ house. On a recent visit, Davis threw out ideas one on top of another as she tried to maneuver her huge belly (Sophia Clare arrived on Feb. 10) into a comfortable position. Two-year-old Paul pushed the vacuum cleaner around with noisy enthusiasm. UCLA physicist Steve Kivelson--Davis’ husband--padded about on bare feet, munching on Cheerios from a box as he chatted with an East Coast collaborator, occasionally spewing out strange bits of physics babble: “That’ll get squished in the KY directions. . .” or “the asymptotic correlation function is pretty isotropic.”

Davis calls Kivelson a great collaborator who’s gone so far as to demonstrate wave interactions by dripping water down cookie sheets and pointing out the patterns of flow.

He’s also a fan, particularly of her abstract mathematical pieces, such as the solitons.

“Pam is trying to make a sculpture out of a soliton that is a beautiful piece of art and also captures the essence of what the physical soliton is,” he says. “She’s trying to communicate what a scientific aesthetic is, and that’s a very abstract concept--but very important.

“Everyone says, you should do beautiful science,” he elaborates. “But that’s just a platitude. You have to think about what it means to be beautiful. The process of discussing these things with Pam has made me think about what beautiful science is.”

If Kahn’s mission is to test the limits of understanding, Davis aims to explore what understanding really means. “What does it mean to know something?” she asks. “Good science makes you think about that.”

In some ways, it’s one of the oldest questions in science. Isaac Newton, who figured out that the fall of the apple and the orbit of the moon were both ruled by gravity, made it quite clear that he still didn’t know how gravity worked. Niels Bohr, the father of the quantum mechanics that rule the inner world of the atom, said that understanding atoms would require a serious rethinking of what understanding means. Davis decided to tackle the soliton in part because it had been proposed as a possible solution to another thorny physics problem--the so-called high temperature superconductors. A superconductor is a material that can conduct electricity without any friction or loss of energy; an electric current in a superconductor is immortal. The problem is, these magical materials have to be really cold to work--at least 400-odd degrees below zero. When some physicists announced in the mid-’80s that they’d discovered some comparatively high-temperature superconductors, it’s fair to say that the physics community went berserk.

In fact, the March 1987 physics meeting at the New York Hilton where many of the findings were discussed has become known as the Woodstock of physics, with thousands of physicists packed into overcrowded corridors.

One group from UC Santa Barbara, known as the Santa Barbarians, included Steve Kivelson, who is one of the top people in his field. (Kivelson also collaborates with his father, a UCLA chemist. His mother, a UCLA astrophysicist, is an expert in planetary magnetism and project leader for the Galileo mission to Jupiter.) In the midst of all the excitement was 2,000 square feet of “Physics Art” by Pamela Davis.

Some of the pieces were “talking paintings”--huge canvases of scientists collaborating on a beach, or huddled over equations, or holding babies.

Others pieces were interactive sculptures that represented abstract concepts, for example, a “Devil’s Staircase”--an infinite series of numbers made concrete in a 5-foot sculpture of welded steel. “It’s devilish because you take infinitely many steps and you don’t get anywhere,” says physicist Per Bak of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, who worked with Davis on the project.

The 1987 meeting promoted close contact between artist and physicists; it inspired Davis to really dig into solitons. “There was this idea that superconductivity might be carried through solitons,” she says. “I wanted to do cutting edge physics.”

Somehow, electric currents manage to pass through superconductors like ghosts--without interacting with anything. The same is true of solitons; they do not dissipate or spread out like ordinary waves. They just keep going, like a slip knot in rope, moving along but never changing. Tsunamis--those mountain-sized tidal waves that zip across thousands of miles of ocean faster than a jet plane and don’t lose an ounce of oomph--are solitons. So maybe, thought some physicists, there is a connection between these two unstoppable things.

Davis’ soliton is a flexible, traveling wave that moves through two 30-foot-long chains of pendulums fashioned from deep-blue anodized steel, racquetballs and springs. One segment appears to float 7 feet overhead; another looms above it at 9 feet. The soliton itself moves along the chains silently, like the bump of a person’s knee changing position under a sheet.

This may seem an unlikely subject for an artist, but Davis has been doing unlikely things for most of her life. At 14, she ran away from home. At 17, she went to France at the invitation of a physicist she’d met in Palo Alto. She wound up living with his mother, taking French lessons and meeting other scientists. She returned to the United States to attend an experimental college, Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Mass., then went back to Europe for Stanford University’s program in Florence, and to art school. From there she went to Yale, where she made two-ton sculptures in her studio, and elsewhere.

“I had this nice room [at Yale], and I took all the furniture out.” She wanted to see the light play through the old beveled windows. “I put bits of glass on different materials, on water, to see how the light would go through.”

At graduate school at the Art Institute in Chicago, she became frustrated because they wanted her to choose between being a painter and being a sculpture. “I wasn’t either. I was an artist. I went in doing sculpture and came out showing painting.”

In 1980, she went to Bear Grass, N.C., on a National Arts Endowment program that brought arts to rural areas. “I was so disillusioned about what I thought the job of being an artist was, so I wanted to do something in the real world. I taught every student in the county. It was a farming community, and the point of reference was the Bible. So we built this 30-foot ark [as a community arts project]. It was just like Noah’s ark, but surrounded by folk art.”

Eventually she returned to New York, where she lived in a loft and painted New York club life. “I could get into all these clubs. I would sketch and paint. I signed my paintings ‘Shark’.”

But she was drawn to science. While dating a mathematician, she found a richness that was absent in other people she knew. “The New York art world was like an old boys network. I learned it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to get as far away from New York as possible.”

All the while, she and Steve Kivelson were being pushed toward each other by a couple of maiden aunts who happened to be friends. “It was an arranged marriage,” says Davis.

While Davis was in Chicago, Kivelson was at Harvard. When she was hanging outin her New York loft, he was already a professor at State University of New York at Stony Brook; Soon she started commuting between New York and Stony Brook. She’d listen in as Kivelson and his physicist roommates stayed up all night to discuss ideas.

Their wedding cake, Davis reports, was decorated with figures from physics papers. “There was scientific notation on every tier.”

Davis’ art, like her life, has eluded categories. Recently some of her photographs were shown at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, in a stark white room so deafeningly silent that the click of the curator’s high heels echoed like thunder.

In some images, streams of water drape in sensual folds, like curtains; in others, spheres of water shaped by gravity and surface tension float in otherworldly landscapes with rivers of light. Like many artists and scientists, Davis is fascinated with symmetry, flow, properties of reflection and what happens at the edges of things. “It’s amazing. Any time you pour milk, you’re going to get these [forms]. I love that. It’s so easy to see.”

Her technique is almost embarrassingly low tech. Take an eyedropper and fill it with a mix of water, glycerin and reflective flakes and drip it against a dark background. Shoot a hundred frames, and maybe you get something. “I find it really satisfying that you can perceive these as representations of science, or fine art, or somewhere in between. I like the idea that it challenges expectations. It’s important to shake your tree from time to time.”

Like Kahn, Davis takes her cues from the physical world. “The nice thing about nature is, you can show off what is there. It’s even more fantastic than anything you could think of.” But she also collaborates very closely with physicists. Among them is UC Berkeley’s Dan Rokhsar, who helped Davis build her solitons, nearly severing a finger in the process. “He gave blood for this project,” she says.

When Rokhsar met Davis, he was a graduate student working on the structure of glasses. A “glassy” material, to a physicist, is one that falls into that murky ground between liquid and solid; a sort of solid liquid, it doesn’t flow, but it doesn’t crystallize either. Physicists call this state of matter “frustrated,” because no matter how you try to stack the atoms together--like pears in a shipping box--they don’t quite fit. “So inevitably you get these stresses and strains,” says Rokhsar. “No matter what you do, no one is happy. That’s frustration.”

Based on these ideas, Davis built her “Frustrated Icosohedron”--a huge, red oak geometrical solid made out of 20-odd perfect pyramids. “It’s analogous to a phase transition, to glass,” she says. “We made some extra ones [so the pieces don’t quite fit.]” It’s like trying to jam a few extra pieces into a jigsaw puzzle.

Some physicists view frustration as geometry in the wrong dimension. That is, in four-dimensional space, the 20 pyramids would fit perfectly. But because our world is stuck with three dimensions, the material has to be torn, stretched and glued to fit (rather like trying to put the foot of one of Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters into the dainty glass slipper.)

Rokhsar’s physics obviously had a deep impact on Davis’ art, but inspiration also flowed the other way as well. “She got us all interested in art, in thinking about aesthetics. Part of the attraction for physicists is Pam’s personality. She’s so convinced that it’s important to convey this visually--she is so enthusiastic--she forced people to think about it. It gave physicists someone to talk to about those aspects of their work.”