Minkowski's Garden

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ooohkay

so i was thinking about relativity or space or time or something...

oh i remember. this makes sense now.

around the time of working on this song

i was also working on a series of art pieces 

(that are actually being released on the same day as this song *WEIRD*)

and my working title for the collection was "Quantum Geometry"

(I ended up naming it YOU HAVE BEEN TO SPACE)

and because I had picked this title out of my own mind

I wanted to look around and see if any other brainiacs 

actually were doing quantum geometry, like math, not colorful pictures

and eventually I found this guy

Hermann Minkowski.

This is the dude who had Einstein as a student.

He actually worked with Einstein and his special theory of relativity

and introduced the idea that space and time are intermeshed

in a 4 dimensional kind of way.

He gave a speech on the topic titled "Space and Time"

at the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians on September 21, 1908.

Here is a famous excerpt.

"The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."

- Hermann Minkowski

So you know me, that's already my kind of stuff.

But anyway, he did all this brilliant stuff, 

has all kinds of mathematical concepts named after him,

and as all people do, he died (in 1909). 

His good friend David Hilbert gave his eulogy and this particular section has stuck with me ever since.

"Our science, which we loved above all else, brought us together; it seemed to us a garden full of flowers. In it, we enjoyed looking for hidden pathways and discovered many a new perspective that appealed to our sense of beauty, and when one of us showed it to the other and we marveled over it together, our joy was complete."

- David Hilbert

I think there's a lot of profound wisdom in thinking about science

(or any discipline for that matter)

(or creative thought in general)

as a garden. With soil, and atmosphere, and flowers.

This song is inspired by Hermann Minkowski, David Hilbert, 

and their beautiful garden of ideas.

So what's growing in your garden?

Wow okay um

this piece i was thinking a lot about minkowski

and his garden of ideas

and i freaking love flowers and have lots and lots of photos of flowers

but while digging through my collection

i found a photo of an experiment i did

basically i saw on the internet that you can turn flowers uv responsive

by putting normal highlighters in the water

which i did

and thought was completely amazing

the picture of the flowers was titled "nuclear daisies"

but you know i guess i just didn't feel like i "released" that piece enough

so i'm glad it got some more mileage here

i built this whole image with the "back wall" and "floor"

and put the flowers in

and was looking at it for a long time

until i noticed that photoshop has a 3d button

so having never pushed that particular button before

i figured i would see what it does

and now you can see what it does too

i really really like this piece 

i think for some reason it's one of my more "mature" works

but i couldn't tell you why