The Kalliroscope is a creation of Paul Matisse
Paul Matisse (born 1933) is an artist and inventor. He is known especially for his public art installations, many of which are interactive. He is also inventor of the Kalliroscope.
In 1954, Matisse graduated from Harvard, where he once lived in Eliot House with Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce, and Sadruddin Aga Khan, a descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. After college he briefly studied at Harvard's Graduate School of Design before working in product development for Arthur D. Little. In 1962 he set off on his own, manufacturing Kalliroscopes.
From 1977 to 1979 he helped enlarge a sculpture by Alexander Calder (who died in 1976) for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, he began his own public art career.
He currently resides in a former Baptist church in Groton, Massachusetts. He is the stepson of artist Marcel Duchamp and grandson of French painter Henri Matisse. Henri Matisse's son, Pierre Matisse, was Paul's father. His daughter Sophie Matisse is a painter in New York.
The
Kalliroscope is a fascinating device.
A Kalliroscope© is a device for viewing fluid currents. Kalliroscopes are both works of art and intuitively educational displays of the scientific principles of fluid dynamics. They are glass and steel constructions containing a current-visualizing fluid.
My one time student at the Harvard Biophysical Lab and then, after he graduated with his Ph D,colleague,
Barry Bunow gave me one to use as a teaching tool. I used it for years. It is a great tool for teaching complexity science. Read on below and I'll explain.
The phenomenon it can illustrate quite impressively is called Rayleigh–Bénard convection and can also be demonstrated using a petri dish of water on a hot plate. The way we used it was to warm the fluid by tucking it in one's shirt until the demo was to be held. A beaker of ice provides the little bit of cold water that gets poured on top and it sits there because the edge of the case is slightly elevated. The Kalliroscope is more impressive because the fluid is colored and the flow lines show up as a different shade. It is quite graphic.
So what is it all about?
Rayleigh–Bénard convection is a type of natural convection, occurring in a plane horizontal layer of fluid heated from below, in which the fluid develops a regular pattern of convection cells known as Bénard cells. Rayleigh–Bénard convection is one of the most commonly studied convection phenomena because of its analytical and experimental accessibility. The convection patterns are the most carefully examined example of self-organizing nonlinear systems.
Buoyancy, and hence gravity, is responsible for the appearance of convection cells. The initial movement is the upwelling of lesser density fluid from the heated bottom layer. This upwelling spontaneously organizes into a regular pattern of cells.
In a vibration free lab setting the convection cells are perfectly hexagonal and the display looks like a honeycomb but in any other setting they are somewhat irregular. The key idea above is this:
The convection patterns are the most carefully examined example of self-organizing nonlinear systems.
I have written many diaries here about the failure of reductionist science to deal successfully with complex real systems. It does fine if you accept its restrictions to systems that are essentially machines and reducible to some extent.
This simple system is a demonstration of what that means. First of all, any liquid will exhibit the self organization. My first question to the students as they gaped in awe at the event that organized the fluid from nowhere was how the system could be made with any fluid. The molecular identity had almost nothing to do with it. So much for what they were learning in molecular biology.
If you are skeptical about this find this book:
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1982). Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability (Dover). ISBN 0-486-64071-X
Chandrasekhar
was an Indian American astrophysicist born in Lahore who, with William A. Fowler, was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for his mathematical theory of black holes, which was a key discovery that led to the currently accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars.
Roughly half the book is devoted to the hydrodynamics of the convection cells and the math is impressive. What is even more impressive is that there is no mathematical way to describe the formation of the cells...the self organizing event.
Anyone who has followed what I have tried to say in my diaries here should recognize the importance of this simple demonstration. As we laud climate scientists and other scientists who are helping us understand what our complex self organizing planet is up to we need to realize that they, like Chandresakhar, have no way of predicting events like this.
Reality is a tough game even for the best scientists. That is because the surrogate world they have created with their models is a product of machine like reduction of reality into what they can handle. The complex real world is much more difficult and we keep seeing new ways this truth is manifested.
I wrote a paper years ago about how cubism in art was at least 50 years ahead of science in understanding the difference between reductionism and reality. Unfortunately, ideas like this do not translate into money making technology and therefore have little impact on the system that is doing us in.
This is a glimpse of what we are up against. I'll be 79 in March and my health could be better. I hope some of these ideas are picked up by younger people and developed.