WEEK 9: Black Holes as told by Andrew Hamilton

This week we had a very distinguished visitor to our class, CU Professor in the Dept of Astrophysics and developer of the Black Hole Flight Simulator, the inimitable and exciting Andrew Hamilton. His website is full of research and examples of his particular type of science visualizations, or SCI VIS, made to think about black holes in space.  He has contributed science visualizations to NOVA programs, to travelling Planetarium shows originally developed at the Denver Science Museum, and in fact it's hard to  do any research on black hole visuals without bumping into him--he is surely the dark star of our Astrophysics dept! Check out this article on him "Strange Physics" at DISCOVER magazine.

WEEK 8: SPACE (1) SemiConductor, Janna Levin, &The Galilean Satellites

This week's first steps into the macro universe included two videos by the UK artist duo Semiconductor--we watched their videos Brilliant Noise (2006) made from raw data images of the Sun, and Magnetic Movie (2007), both of which uses very interesting soundscapes to explore the reality of background radiation in the universe by utilizing very low frequency  field recordings or 'natural radio' . Find out more aobut this by checking out VLF guru Steve MacGreevey.
The we watched another TED talk, this one by physicist  Janna Levin, who also writes novels.  Here's a Seed Salon video version of a conversation about Truth & Beauty between Levin and author Jonathan Lethem that is a companion to the handout we read from Science is Culture.
Lastly we looked at some incredible 16mm films by Courtney Hoskins, a graduate of CU Boulder's Film Dept who keeps a blog called An Astronomer in Hollywood. She made a suiteof films in response to the Jupiter mission's data on the moons, called The Galilean Satellites.
Now we might just be ready for Professor Andrew Hamilton's visit.