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.

Comments

Cue DCMA takedown notices in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue DCMA takedown notices in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

Monkeys & typewriters

[Anonymous Coward]

It IS cheaper than sending an army of monkeys with typewriters up there.

Um, what?

[jandrese]

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?

Re:Um, what?

[hackertourist]

Not just eventually, all at once. We just have no way to extract all that superimposed information.

I half expect the author to eventually come out and say he just made it all up to find out how much nonsense he could get away with by labeling it art.

Better

[itzly]

I have a black piece of paper that has all the works of literature printed on it.

Re:On the flip side

[gstoddart]

Since the chip is receiving cosmic rays produced eons ago, that means that ALL art is prior art for itself!

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!!

Infiniteness of infinity ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

In the book Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein, (pulitzer, librarian of the library of congress) mentions an incident about Kepler. His wife gave him a salad for dinner and he apparently asked her, "Imagine! If lettuce leaves, drops of oil, grains of salt and slices of eggs have been flying about this room since eternity for ever. Is it possible, by pure random coincidence, they could come together and form this salad?". Apparently Mrs Kepler replied, "They might, or they might not, but they won't make a salad as nice as I have made!"

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.