A major part of the reason I’ve been very quiet here since the last post is because I was working on a different kind of project that has in fact taken up much of my bandwidth during the last many months. This has been very welcome, as there is a … Click to continue reading this post
This evening at 7:30pm Central time, come to Fermilab (online) for a public talk I’ll give about shaking up how we present serious scientific ideas in books for the public. It should be fun! The information is here. -cvj
On Saturday (tomorrow), I’ll be talking with science writer Philip Ball at the Malvern Festival of Ideas! The topic will be Science and Art, and I think it will be an interesting and fun exchange. It is free, online, and starts at 5:15 pm UK time. You can click here for the details.
I’ll talk a little bit about how I came to create the non-fiction science book The Dialogues, using graphic narrative art to help frame and drive the ideas forward, and how I really wanted to re-shape what is the norm for a popular science book, where somehow using just prose to talk about serious scientific ideas has become regarded as the pinnacle of achievement – this runs counter to so many things, not the least being the fact that scientists themselves don’t just use prose to communicate with each other!
But anyway, that’s just the beginning of it all. Philip and I will talk about […] Click to continue reading this post
Revisiting an old friend you might recognize. (And discovering that my old inking/shading workflow was just fine. – I’d been experimenting with other approaches and also just getting back into the saddle, as it were. I’ve found that I’d already landed on this approach for good time-cost/benefit reasons.) -cvj
Felt like one of the best things to sit and do with family on the morning after the day before…
A shot of a (relatively) quick sketch in progress on Sunday, done with a dipping ink pen, and then splashing on some watercolour. Mostly just knocking rust off the sketching machinery (haven’t used these tools in a long while), and relaxing for some moments between one thing and the next … Click to continue reading this post
A montage of some of my notebooks. Click to zoom in![/caption]
This is a quick montage of a selection of my notebooks over the last few years. As you may know, I often carry a little (usually black) notebook with me whenever out and about in the world (in normal circumstances at least). It is useful for jotting down or working through ideas, doing computations of research ideas, writing to-do lists, and -very importantly- it is an especially good means of reminding me to grab a moment to do a sketch. As a result, they’ve become a record of what I’ve been thinking about in certain periods, what I might have seen on the way to work (back when I was sketching faces on the subway), and also an interesting combination of marks on paper that I actually simply like just looking at.
On Thursday I’ll be taking part in a big event at the Getty […] Click to continue reading this post
I found a few minutes to sketch a few days ago. Just a little bit of time. And it was one of those drawing episodes where – after three or four lines -things just fell nicely into place rapidly and I could see the way all the way to the … Click to continue reading this post
My big task this afternoon was not baking but making a hexahexaflexagon! I can’t tell you why right now, but as far as I know it has nothing to do with my recent paper on JT gravity in case you were trying to see a connection.
To end the week, a remarkable coincidence. This morning, I was listening to one of Wynton Marsalis’ greatest recordings, his 1983 album with the Haydn trumpet concerto in E flat major. Just found it on by accident on the radio, and found myself wondering what he’s up to these days … Click to continue reading this post
I realized recently that I’ve forgotten a great deal of my drawing skills, settling back into some clunky habits, due to zero practice. But I’m going to need them back for a project, and so will start teaching myself again. Above is a (digital) chalk doodle I did yesterday. –cvj
Oh, that talk I did at Perimeter? It is available online now. It is all about the process of making the book “The Dialogues”, why I did it and how I did it. Along the way, I show some examples and talk about the science they’re bringing to life, but this is not primarily a science talk but a talk about talking about science, if you see what I mean.
The talk starts slowly, but bear with me and it warms up swiftly!
YouTube link here. Ended below:
[…] Click to continue reading this post
In case you were putting the kettle on to make tea for watching the live cast…. Or putting on your boots to head out to see it in person, my public talk at the Perimeter Institute has been postponed to tomorrow! It’ll be just as graphic! Here’s a link to the event’s details.
Maybe a decade or so ago* I made a Halloween costume which featured this simple mask decorated with symbols. “The scary face of science” I called it, mostly referring to people’s irrational fear of mathematics. I think I was being ironic. In retrospect, I don’t think it was funny at all.
(Originally posted on Instagram here.)
-cvj
(*I’ve since found the link. Seems it was actually 7 years ago.) Click to continue reading this post
I was asked by editors of the magazine Physics World’s 30th anniversary edition to do a drawing that somehow captures changes in physics over the last 30 years, and looks forward to 30 years from now. This was an interesting challenge. There was not anything like the freedom to use space that I had in other works I’ve done, like my graphic book about science “The Dialogues”, or my glimpse of the near future in my SF story “Resolution” in the Twelve Tomorrows anthology. I had over 230 pages for the former, and 20 pages for the latter. Here, I had one page. Well, actually a little over 2/3 of a page (once you take into account the introductory text, etc).
So I thought about it a lot. The editors wanted to show an active working environment, and so I thought about the interiors of labs for some time, looked up lots of physics breakthroughs over the years, and reflected on what might come. I eventually realized that the most important single change in the science that can be visually depicted (and arguably the single most important change of any kind) is the change that’s happened to the scientists. Most importantly, we’ve become more diverse in various ways (not uniformly across all fields though), much more collaborative, and the means by which we communicate in order to do science have expanded greatly. All of this has benefited the science greatly, and I think that if you were to get a time machine and visit a lab 30 years ago, or 30 years from now, it will be the changes in the people that will most strike you, if you’re paying attention. So I decided to focus on the break/discussion area of the lab, and imagined that someone stood in the same spot each year and took a snapshot. What we’re seeing is those photos tacked to a noticeboard somewhere, and that’s our time machine. Have a look, and keep an eye out for various details I put in to reflect the different periods. Enjoy! (Direct link here, and below I’ve embedded the image itself that’s from the magazine. I recommend reading the whole issue, as it is a great survey of the last 30 years.)
