The Artist and Science educator Bob Miller died on Sunday. This is very sad news indeed. He and his work may be familiar to many of you from San Francisco’s Exploratorium.
I met him only once, on the evening of April 23rd 2006 at a Categorically Not! event. From that short time I got a sense of his enthusiasm for explaining many phenomena in optics and other aspects of physics to anyone who would listen. He was a unique and highly original person in every positive sense of those words, and his passing is a great loss. The Cat Not! event during which I saw him in action (see clickable image on right) describing optical illusions and other phenomena was one of the most delightful such evenings that I can recall. After re-reading my report on the event, I thought I’d share it with you as a celebration of his life. It is the previous post, and it has links to some of Bob’s work.
Bob Miller was a dear friend of science writer K. C. Cole, and so (with her permission) I am reproducing here a piece that she wrote about Bob Miller not too long ago. It is a fitting tribute. -cvj
The physicist Frank Oppenheimer used to say that artists and scientists are the official “noticers†of society—people whose business it is to notice things that other people either never learned to see or have learned to ignore.
I’ve never known anyone with quite the knack for noticing as San Francisco artist Bob Miller, and since I’ve known him, countless things I used to think quite ordinary have been animated by his imagination. Once he asked me: How would you suspend 500,000 pounds of water in the air with no visible means of support?
some might call “light art”. He’s well known for creating a large number of wonderful works using light and shadow, several of them forming the cornerstone of exhibitions in the Exploratorium in San Francisco, for example. Have a look at the “lightwalk”, linked 
Two Thursdays ago I went up to Santa Barbara to give a seminar. I had a great time, and it reminded me why it can be so much fun to go somewhere and visit for even a short time and do that. I got to catch up with several old friends, including Santa Barbara itself, where I lived for a number of years in the 90’s when I was a postdoc. I spent time chatting with the various people there before (at lunch) and after (individually) the seminar, learning about some of the research they’re doing, and also talking about other matters physics-wise and gossip-wise. I wish I’d had more time to talk since I did not get to talk to everyone I wanted to talk to, and not at as much length as I would have liked. (This was partly due to the fact that I spent the morning in my hotel room writing some of the slides for my talk. - I had a presentation the day before to focus on, along with a departmental visitor to host, and the day before I was also occupied. Don’t ask about any earlier than that - I never prepare new material that much in advance. Not because I don’t want to, but it just never happens… if I have more than a day or two, I will find that there’s other stuff I have to do.)
In my fog of too many things to do, I forgot to tell you about this event, which happens today at 5:30. I only remembered this morning as I dug a slightly better than normal shirt (for the event) out of the laundry pile and started to iron it:
