Invisible Force Fields Create Art

Invisible Force Fields Create Art

By Tracy Staedter, Discovery News



April 8, 2005 —A physics class competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., has students making art out of invisible forces.

The Weird Fields contest, part of the undergraduate course "Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism," — encourages students to use a special computer program that converts mathematical formulas 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 visualization kind of brings the equations into the real world," said freshman 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....cont'd

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050404/weirdfield.html


Artists have been bringing 'invisible worlds' into the 'real world' for a long time....