LISTENING TO THE UNIVERSE
Quote from Zoom conversation withGonzalo Gil, physicist and founder of Asteria Creatives, The Bayes Centre, Edinburgh. 8 February 2021. Layout Victoria Evans.
The first time I remember becoming aware of sound was at an artists’ residency in Inshriach Bothy, Aviemore, in 2014. I spent hours alone in woodland, with a digital sound recorder, listening intently to my surroundings. I noticed that I was invisible to the deer and red squirrels there until I moved or made a noise. I became aware of the interconnection between movement and sound. The animals themselves were surprisingly noisy, making no effort to be silent, so I always heard them before I saw them. Of course, if they happened to noticed me, a potential predator, they froze; attempting to disappear from my perception in stillness, before hazarding a noisy exit from my field of view. The idea of sound, as a carrier wave for action, became concrete to me for the first time through this experience.
A few years later, in Spring 2016, I attended a University public outreach talk by Professor Martin Hendry, an astrophysicist at the University of Glasgow. Professor Hendry's talk (2016) concerned some very big news in science: something called gravitational waves had just been directly detected for the very first time and this confirmed, a century later, a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity (LIGO, 2016). Obtaining this proof, of the existence of gravitational waves, was the result of a decades long international project to build a massive gravitational wave detector in the US (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)). Professor Hendry's department played a key role, by designing some of the most sensitive parts of the detector. The discovery was significant enough to make the mainstream news and won three members of the LIGO team the Nobel prize for physics (KVA, 2017).
Gravitational waves are expansions and compressions in the fabric of space and time. Popularly characterised as ‘ripples in spacetime’[1] (LIGO, 2016) physicists have frequently referred to gravitational waves as analogous to sound waves. Light, sound, seismic and gravitational disturbances all travel in waves, in different configurations, and in different fields of matter or space. Gravitational waves (GW) travel through a layer of space known as the gravitational field. Those big enough to be detected on Earth are only generated when an enormous kinetic event occurs somewhere in the universe, such as the collision of two enormous black holes: the event which led to the first GW detection at LIGO on September 14, 2015.
I think again of the noisy deer, whose carefree movements in the woods first advertises their presence to me.
The acclaim received by the LIGO team demonstrates how significant the long-awaited empirical evidence of gravitational waves was to the world of physics. However, the reason Professor Hendry's talk captured my own poetic imagination so vividly, was because of his assertion that gravitational waves represent a completely new way of learning about the universe.
To distinguish this method from all the more-or-less optical imaging methods that have gone before, Hendry’s talk characterised this new method as ‘Listening to the Universe’ (Hendry, 2016, Hughes, 2003). Professor Scott Hughes of MIT, one of the Universities behind LIGO, coined the phrase 'Listening to the Universe' in a 2003 article about the potential implications of gravitational wave detection (Hughes, 2003) He explains that, even though a large part of the electro-magnetic spectrum is sub-visual (frequencies not detectible to the human eye - such as X-rays) light waves retain a direct relationship to imaging, in a way that, he argues, neither sound nor gravitational waves do. Electro-magnetic radiation (or EM radiation) ranges from radio waves to gamma rays and covers everything in between, including what we can perceive directly with the naked eye as visible light. The direct detection of gravitational waves means that for the first time ever, scientists have information coming from sources other than EM radiation. From the very first human star gazing, through the invention of the telescope, up to the creation of ultra-sophisticated equipment such as x-ray spectrometry, the entire human relationship with space up until this point has been conducted via these visually oriented, image-based methods of observation, but now gravitational waves can offer something new.
The detection of gravitational waves therefore resonates with my research not only because of its analogous relationship to sound, but because I am interested in perception, and how changes in what we can perceive affect the ways we conceptualise and experience reality. If the discovery of gravitational waves opens up of a new way of perceiving the universe, as Hendry and Hughes argue, then I want to ask what else it might be possible to know differently through an attentiveness to sound and listening? What might happen if the discovery of GW was just one part of a wider epistemological sea-change, in which the generally accepted dominance of the visual in the sensory hierarchy (O’Callaghan, 2008) were to be challenged and rethought.?
Using events from one field of research diffractively to disrupt, compare or shed light on another can prove an interesting way of exploring questions of difference (Sayal-Bennet, 2018, Barad, 2014, Barad, 2007, Haraway, 1999) as well as highlighting questions of similarity and mutual amplification so it is interesting to think about sound waves and earthly interconnectedness in relation to gravitational waves and events in the wider universe. One of the overarching questions that my research addresses, relates to the notion of how apparatuses, or measurement tools, affects what it is possible to measure. A new technological apparatus (or a new emphasis on a biological one) means that new things can possibly be perceived, and through this, new cultural norms may begin to emerge.
An interest in the philosophy and physics of sound and pressure waves; and in the ways sound might be characterised as a connector across space-time informed my research practice for some time. My next film project will explore this idea more directly.
[NB In physical terms, it should be noted that gravitational waves are transversal like EM waves (albeit in a quadrupole formation – meaning they fluctuate transversally in two directions perpendicular to the direction of travel). So, it is debatable whether gravitational waves really bear a stronger physical resemblance to sound waves than they do to light waves. According to Scott, gravitational waves may, superficially at least, bear more formal similarity to the surface involved one type seismic wave activity waves. And it may be easier to understand his analogy with sound by thinking of seismic waves such as those that cause earthquakes. Certain types of these can be classified as mechanical or pressure waves in a way that is analogous to the longitudinal pressure waves associated with sound. In any case, the important point here, according to both Scott and Hendry, is that both gravitational waves and sound waves have properties that make them fundamentally distinct from EM waves. ]
[1] The word spacetime conveys the idea that in physics space is fused with the time in a four-dimensional continuum. Movement in space is therefore also movement through time.
Barad, Karen. "Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart." Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 168-87. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623.
———. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007, 2007.
Sayal-Bennet, Amba. "Diffractive Analysis: Embodied Encounters in Contemporary Artistic Video Practice." Online Paper. Tate Papers 29 (2018). https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/29/diffractive-analysis.
Haraway, Donna. "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/D Others." [In en]. Politica y Sociedad, no. 30 (1999 1999): 121-63.
Hendry, Martin. "Listening to the Universe." Wave if you are a Particle!, Pint of Science, 2016.
LIGO. "Gravitational Waves Detected 100 Years after Einstein’s Prediction." news release, 2016.
KVA. "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017." news release, 2017, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2017/press-release/.
Hughes, Scott A. "Listening to the Universe with Gravitational-Wave Astronomy." Annals of Physics 303, no. 1 (2003/01/01/ 2003): 142-78. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/S0003-4916(02)00025-8. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003491602000258.