Art

Item Description

ARTIST:    Régis Pirastru
TITLE:       Les Merveilles Célestes
MEDIUM:  Mixed media: inks, lacquer, pigments, pollen, fish scales
                 16” x 20”, unframed

This original artwork was created for Art on Science: 26 études an internattional portfolio featuring pictures by artists and words by scientists. This written commentary is by Uriel Frisch and Cornelius Rampf,Astrophysics Department,
CNRS:
 
There is currently a broad consensus among astrophysicists and particle physicists, that the Universe, as we know it, started about 14 billion years ago. It started with a “Big Bang”, a tremendous and chaotic explosion with a very high density and temperature of matter, without any preferred center. 

Now, the Universe is still chaotic, but at the same time it displays a high degree of organization, revealing planets (including the Earth), stars (including the Sun), galaxies (including our Milky Way), clusters of galaxies, and so on, over distances of billions of light years.

How did we leave the initial chaotic Big Bang to become an ordered Universe? It happened very quickly over less than 400,000 years, that is less then the current age of the Universe divided by 35,000. In the early explosion the Universe did not only explode but also cooled down very much, thanks to the expansion of space. As a consequence, negatively charged particles (called electrons) and positively charged particles started engaging in microscopic “marriages” (some of them called atoms). This was the beginning of “normal” (electrically neutral) matter of the kind that surrounds us here on Earth.

This quickly removed most of the initial chaos and lead to a Universe displaying amazingly organized patterns. From a mathematical perspective, the chaotic Universe, all of a sudden, became very smooth. A true second birth of the Universe saw the day. The phenomenon can actually be compared to what Leonardo da Vinci experienced around the year 1480, when people had only their naked eyes to explore the nearest parts of the Universe. In Florence, in the flow of water against bridges in the Arno river, Leonardo used his self-made eye goggles to observe a chaotic flow slowly changing into long-lived“turbulence”, as he called it for the first time.

Item Special Note

Free domestic shipping.

All artworks are 16” x 20”, unframed and will be shipped with a printed copy of the scientist’s text.

For further information about the portfolio, please visit our Art on Science: 26 études website: http://AS26project.com