Image: sciencemuseum.org.uk
We live within math, of course, but we're also rarely confronted by it: statistical possibilities that don't come to pass, the mathematical operators that determine if a particle is to annihilate or survive, the differentiation of sound waves into different pitches within your ears, the precise orbit of the Earth around the Sun as the result of two masses, and so forth, pretty much forever. Math is always there, charting reality's course forward (and backward, outward, and at right-angles).Beginning in 2016, London's Science Museum will feature a new Mathematics Gallery, a pocket of reality where visitors can live abstractly within numbers. The very layout of the gallery will be based on the simulated turbulence field surrounding an experimental aircraft, the Handley Page Gugnunc, recorded in 1929. This research, which pointed the way toward aircraft designs capable of low-speeds and short takeoffs, is credited in part with fostering the nearing boom in civilian airliner travel."The space has been imagined as a wind tunnel for the aircraft, which will hang suspended in the centre of the hall, with the layout of related exhibits following the imagined lines of airflow around it," a Science Museum announcement explains."[The new gallery] connects certain ideas about complexity and curvature within sciences and maths, within the gallery," the new space's architect, Zaha Hadid, notes in a video. "It's not an art installation, it's a scientific installation."You can see the not-art design visualized above.
Advertisement