Have you been here?

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Gros Morne National Park, NL

Watercolour, crayon and gouache

©2014 Charlene Brown

I did my first ‘Have you been here?’ post about Newfoundland + Labrador in 2009.  

It was the only Canadian province I hadn’t been to, and at the time I fully expected to be crossing it off my bucket list within a couple of years. But here I am, more than four years later, planning to go to Bulgaria and Albania  in a few months… and I still haven’t been to Newfoundland + Labrador! 

Google Streetview after dark

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Returning to San Francisco for the evening

Watercolour, crayon and marker

©2014 Charlene Brown

Once again I’m repainting, as a night scene, one of the locations I painted on the Virtual Paintout. This time it’s the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco that I painted four years ago using a view from Google Streetview - which is notoriously (and understandably) short of night scenes.  

I mentioned at the time that ‘Zooming down a freeway, surrounded by people who actually know where they’re going and want to get there faster than you happen to be going, is never a pleasant place to be’ … and I’d have to say that driving at night must be even worse!  But it’s certainly a spectacular view to paint!

Amplituhedron – the penultimate step in defining…

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The Theory of Everything

Watercolour, crayon and Photoshop

©2014 Charlene Brown

In 2013, physicists discovered a geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions. “The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” according to Jacob Bourjaily, one of the researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.” Well, that’s easy for him to say… But this uncluttered visualization does make key concepts of quantum physics very nearly comprehensible.

And by simplifying the equations needed to calculate scattering amplitudes of particle interactions, the amplituhedron is bringing quantum physicists much closer to unifying gravity and quantum theory under one comprehensive model, the Grand Unifying Theory (aka. Theory of Everything). After decades of mind-boggling research and attempts at resolving the theoretical issues – ideas like string theory tend to be confusing and unprovable – all existence comes down to this small structure, or something very like it. 

What will Sheldon Cooper make of it? 

What might some brilliant artist make of it?

This painting is based on a well-known sketch by Nima Arkani-Hamed that shows an amplituhedron representing particle interactions. Apparently, using Feynman diagrams, the same calculation would take roughly 500 pages of algebra.

Quantum physics made easy – for some

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The Feynman-Hundertwasser Solution

Watercolour, crayon and Photoshop

©2014 Charlene Brown

Feynman diagrams are pictorial representations of the mathematical expressions governing the interactions of subatomic particles. They enable theoretical physicists to come up with easy answers to difficult problems in quantum mechanics… problems such as the self-energy of particles that had previously produced infinite answers for particle mass calculations. (Because E=mc² energy has an equivalent mass so the interaction of an electron's field with its own charge (self-energy) adds to the particle's mass.)

Julian Schwinger of Harvard University and a Japanese theorist, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, independently calculated the self-energy as the sum of an infinite series of progressively smaller terms. Richard Feynman solved the problem in a much more understandable way – Feynman diagrams, with smooth lines representing electrons and wavy lines representing photons, vertical axis representing time, and horizontal axis, space. Long story short… the three of them shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Feynman-Hundertwasser Solution shows a ‘simple’ second order Feynman diagram surrounded by more complicated interactions including virtual particle loops. The addition of Friedenreich Hundertwasser  to the mix doesn't make it any easier to understand, but I think it improves the presentation.

Virtual Paintout in Washington DC

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Pershing Park

Watercolour and crayon

©2014 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Washington DCthis month.  As I moved about the city, staying pretty close to the National Mall, I was very pleased to find this waterfall in Pershing Park. Then, while finding the best angle from which to paint it, I made another discovery, related to the carefully planned layout of the Washington…

The city is brilliantly designed with the most important buildings and monuments connected by radiating avenues… in such a way that spectacular views of the others are visible from each one. This particular park is quite close to the White House, and both the Capitol and the Washington Monument can be seen from this location…  if you happen to be standing in the middle of the street.  This is, of course, exactly where the Google cameras tend to be, as you can see in this link to theStreetview I painted. 

Quantum Computing for Beginners

An Exaltation of Qubits

Watercolour, crayon and Photoshop™

©2014 Charlene Brown

Exaltation is my favourite collective noun. Though only properly used for larks, as far as I know, this arrangement of quantum bits, or qubits, seemed to warrant it… BTW, the arrangement, with X-axes converging dramatically, has nothing to do with how quantum computing works – it just made a nice composition.

Quantum computing is immensely powerful, or will be when someone gets some qubits to stand still long enough, because qubits can store and process practically infinite amounts of information… A classical bit can either be a 0 or a 1, a qubit is any possible combination or superposition of ket 0 and ket 1, the bra-ket notation used for describing quantum states, with complex numbers as coefficients of the superposition. Thus, a qubit in a quantum computer is represented as any point on the surface of a 3D sphere, the Bloch Sphere. Not only can each qubit be in such a superposition state, but the system as a whole can be in a superposition of every combination of different states of all the qubits. The number of possible states that can be present in the superposition is huge – N qubits would have 2^N possible states. The qubits in the picture are shown with a random array of some of the simpler Bloch Sphere states, including ket 0 (top, left) and ket 1 (bottom left) and various points on the X, Y or Z axes.