talk given by roger malina at balance unbalance in bogota columbia june 2 2023 in session organised by ricardo dal farra

1. “Balance-Unbalance… and the
Magic Lamp “How do we
improve our immediate future?”
Roger F Malina
Points of view of an astrophysicist and artscientist
Bogota June 2 2023

2. Two perspectives on the need for Magic Lamps

3. The Magic Lamp in Astrophysics
• The magic lamp of astronomy is the
supernova explosion
• supernova are ‘standard candles’
• You can figure out how far they are by
how bright they appear
• We now use them to measure how
quickly the universe is expanding
(growing)
• If the sun exploded the earth would
evaporate into gas

4. But stars have small explosions too
• research on “space weather”
• The light from the stellar
explosion doesn’t reach earth
• but
• as we increase the number of
satellites for wifi etc the risk of
system collapse we increase
• very high risk on a 100 year
timescale

5. Climate change risk could be overtaken by
asteroid, space junk impact, solar flares

6. An ArtScience Perspective on Aladdin’s Lamp
It is important we study what goes on under our
feet
• we are very badly designed to
understand the world under the lamp
• Our human senses evolved just
enough to help us survive long
enough to have children
• to understand the world we have had
to design/built
• Augmented senses
• Extended senses
• New senses that have no human
analog

7. Our Senses are Filters not Windows on the world
BEE HUMAN

9. STOP LOOK THINK

10. The Physics of Loneliness
a journey with Tommy Ayala and and and
• ArtSciLab member Ayen Deng
• A refugee from Sudan
• A black woman, physics student
• Faced incessant racism and sexism in
Texas
• Initiated spoken word poetry as a
publication method in our lab
• Created a small multi cultural team
• Quanta Project led by Ayen Deng
• Applying physics concepts and
methods to address racism
• Are atoms racist or sexist
• Water molecules ?
• Viruses ? Sometimes
• So lets shrink humans to the size of
large molecules
• And eliminate racism and sexism

11. Ok Tommy .. Stop… think… look… go