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The Strange Story of the First Quantum Art Exhibition In Space
KentuckyFC writes When Samantha Cristoforetti blasted towards the International Space Station in November last year, she was carrying an unusual cargo in the form of a tiny telescope just 4 centimetres long and 1 centimetre in diameter attached to an unpowered CCD array from a smartphone camera. The telescope is part of an art project designed by the Dutch artist Diemut Strebe in which he intends to invoke quantum mechanics to generate all of the art ever made. Now MIT physicist Seth Lloyd has stepped forward to provide a scientific rationale for the project. He says the interaction of the CCD with the cosmic background radiation ought to generate energy fluctuations that are equivalent to the array containing all possible images in quantum superposition. Most of these will be entirely random but a tiny fraction will be equivalent to the great works of art. All of them! What's more, people on Earth can interact with these images via a second miniature telescope on Earth that can become correlated with the first. Lloyd says this is possible when correlated light enters both telescopes at the same time. Strebe plans to make his quantum space art exhibition available in several places before attaching the second telescope to the James Webb Space telescope and blasting that off into space too. Whatever your view on the art, it's hard not to admire Strebe's powers of persuasion in co-opting the European Space Agency, NASA and MIT into his project.
What the Hell are you people smoking? Must be some good shit to dream up a half assed, cock and bull story like this one!
Cue DCMA takedown notices in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
It IS cheaper than sending an army of monkeys with typewriters up there.
So if I understand the summary correctly (I give myself a 50/50 chance on this), they're basically sampling random noise off of a CCD and claim that eventually it will produce the Mona Lisa? A version of the million monkeys at typewriters producing Shakespeare?
I read the internet for the articles.
I have a black piece of paper that has all the works of literature printed on it.
When I go to the space station, I'm planning to take a 4 centimeter long toy shark, and then I'll jump over it.
Artist makes up stuff. We can't reliably entangle molecules, let alone making two macroscopic telescopes have any quantum relationship. In adition there is nothing special about the cosmic background radiation; the CCD could have had any quantum effects he is aiming for imbued on earth.
Nothing but a publicity stunt with no scientific backing.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I must confess, the vast majority of stuff related to quantum stuff sounds like pure gibberish to the layman.
But this is ... the million monkeys hypothesis?
So, now the question, how many zillion years will it take to ever have this "work of art"? Is it longer than the life of the universe?
This sounds like "given infinite time and infinite monkeys the flung poo could resemble the Mona Lisa, but mostly it will look like flung poo", when the reality is "but you'll need eleventy zillion years for that to happen". This sounds more like "random splotches will appear, but maybe someday it might look like something".
I'm sorry, but I agree this sounds more like a PR stunt than anything else.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Every great work of literature ever, even those not yet written, now in an compact, easy to carry form :
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A million here. A million there. Pretty soon you're talking about infinity.
Just like the federal debt.
LOL ... *takes bong hit* ....
Wow, man ... so the purpose of the art is to demonstrate the futility in the belief that we can ever truly own anything, or truly create anything, because the universe has already produced all possible combinations of everything and we're too late -- we're merely going through the motions.
Free will, being merely an illusion, binds us to our grasping for understanding, while our limited monkey minds are barely capable of perceiving the world around us, let alone the expansive universe we can't even begin to grasp.
The universe has anticipated all of our feeble attempts to understand it, and has proactively placed all of the answers out there to mock us, but at the same time enlighten those of us willing to listen and grasp the larger purpose.
We are merely the vessels through which the universe demonstrates the futility of knowledge and understanding, because in the end, we don't know anything which hasn't been known before.
If all things have existed in all combinations before, the works of Shaespeare really could have originally been discovered in Klingon.
Wow man, that's just like so meta.
Dude, you rock!!
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So the cops will want to talk to this guy about his kiddie porn collection, I guess.
Dark Reflection
Budget cuts, you see .. it costs a lot to feed an infinite amount of monkeys, and the poo really piles up quickly.
In fact, an infinite amount of monkey poo causes its own problems ... and in no smallway distracts the monkeys from the task at hand.
It's very complicated, sciency stuff. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I chalked it up to brilliant minds struggling to fathom the differences in infinity in a pre-calculus era. Two things might be infinite. (time elapsed and the jauxtapositions of the salad ingredients in space). But still one thing could be more infinite than the other, and natural languages are quite inadequate to grapple such things.
Here it looks like the artist is understanding the principles of Quantum superposition in a vague non-mathematical non-physical sense, the way someone from that pre-calculus era might understand it. Yes, the state could be a superposition of all possible states. But superposition of all possible things would be some random squiggle, not art. It is almost like saying the md5 checksum digest of my file TriangleTetIntersection.cpp actually "represents", not just the characters and letter strings in that file, but actually all the algorithms in that file.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"The key point that Wigner’s friend experiment raises is that consciousness seems necessary to determine the result of a quantum mechanical measurement process. Without consciousness, all the elements of the experiment remain in a superposition of all possible states." link
The logic here is faulty, the observer is something in the rest of the universe that is affected by the collapse of the wave function, and that doesn't have to be conscious. See also