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.

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.