Anna and I are taking on this Provocation together. It’s still at an early stage, but we have a sort of theme – Truth versus Beauty; Beauty, Truth – Truth and Beauty in connection to the art world, but it might go further to the environmental – humanities – infra-ordinary and who knows!
In this first draft, which is just an outline, I’m going to make it personal and based on my main theme, doing my MSc in Physics in Canada in the Seventies, with a nod to Perec’s advice to closely observe the infra-ordinary. I’ll start with me using science to get at the truth, physics to be objective, and the images of the diffraction patterns etc. to provide beauty to this truth. I’ll try to reword this, so that I’m beginning with science, seeing my observations as art, and ending with beauty. The process of improving the gold crystals, reducing their imperfections is the scientific and artistic work to produce the beauty of a more perfect gold crystal. This can only be observed using techniques that access extremely small details of the crystal; to the naked eye, nothing has changed, it just stayed a small piece of shiny metal. I hope this makes sense!
Anna’s Start
Provocations
Beauty Truth, Truth Beauty (draft theme)
Teaching Week 9 – 18th April 2024
This week you will present your Provocation Presentations. You will have 6 -10 mins each to argue your position in opposition to your other pairing. Each 20 – 30 min presentation slot will include time to feedback and discuss as a whole cohort. Remember to reflect on this experience in your Journal.
Provocations | Thursday 18th April 17:00 – 19:30 BST | Hayley Lock
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We had a starting discussion and are now working separately.
While David is tapping it through his scientific perspectives and former research connected to his artworks related to Perec – I am going around Boticelli, Vasnetsov and the jungian archetypes of woman and beauty in the pioneering photography era – with aim to also connect the body perfection/un-perfection theories to the post-environmental realities.
In the next discussion we will try to come both to meeting points in our research and also to the opposite views and rhetoric of the presentation.
https://spaces.oca.ac.uk/anna/
Truth and Beauty (and the Infra-Ordinary)
In my MA I’m taking the time period of the Seventies when I did my MSc in Canada and the memories evoked by artefacts from that time.
Now I am mainly going to look at the actual research, linking it to Perec’s exhortation, to examine my thoughts on Truth and Beauty.
Research Aims
My research at Brock was to find a process for reducing, locating and quantifying the defects in crystals. This affects the properties of metals and semiconductors.
A well-ordered crystal has all its atoms on the apex points of a lattice structure at very low temperatures. If the crystal is not well-ordered, some of the atoms will reside in the spaces between the apexes. As the temperature rises, the atoms vibrate about these points.
Observation Methods
Perec wants us to examine closely the commonplace, the infra-ordinary. What I could see with my eyes was a metal disc, around 12mm in diameter, 2 mm thick and gold in colour. No other distinguishing features. Boring to the eye, but what if could ‘look’ closer, and deeper? Are there other ways to observe better? Can we see the atoms and/or how they are arranged? (Get more truth. Get more beauty? Is a single crystal, with all the atoms arranged on their perfect positions in a lattice beautiful? More beautiful than a polycrystalline or amorphous structure? Who would know?).
Can Beauty be created?
A symmetrical human face is said to be beautiful. Is the same true for non-human objects? For metals? For a gold single crystal? Could I create symmetry in a crystal with lots of deformations? Is symmetry in science or mathematics regarded as beautiful? I think that it often is.
How could we see if the symmetry is being improved? How can we examine the crystal at the atomic scale?
Laue X-Ray diffraction
I’m not going to go into details about the techniques, just what they do. X-Ray diffraction can examine the interior of the disc to several microns and tell us about its average structure; if it’s amorphous (no internal crystalline structure), polycrystalline (shown by rings on the diffraction image, meaning small crystals in no particular orientation, or a single crystal (a diffraction pattern of discrete spots in a repeating pattern). Each spot in the diffraction pattern represents a reflection from a particular set of planes in the crystal. The diffraction spot in a perfect crystal is circular and has a sharp outline and any deviations from this are produced by defects in the crystal. We bought a diffraction quality of freshly cleaved NaCl to show this (figure IV. 1(a) )
and compared it with a gold crystal grown on the NaCl reference crystal (figure IV. 1(b)).
In the second x-ray, we can see additional large spots from the gold overlay. The spots aren’t sharp and there’s an additional diffuse background circle in the centre of the pattern. This indicates that the gold has a single crystal structure, but is not perfect and the diffuse circle shows a weak polycrystalline component. There is a mismatch in crystal dimensions between gold and NaCl producing a strain, and thus defects, at the the NaCl-gold interface and/or the gold-air interface..
SEM Scanning Electron Microscopy
This technique doesn’t ‘look’ as far into the object as the X-ray diffraction, but it gives an idea of the arrangement of the atoms near the surface.
I took the (gold on NaCl) crystals, which had sharp X-ray spots, to McMaster University where they had a SEM to examine the near surface structure. In Fig, IV.2(a) the SEM shows that the surface of the gold on NaCl crystal is polycrystalline, by the rings near the surface, caused by the tiny crystals at all angles reflecting the electron beam.
I tested a solid gold single crystal, obtained from colleagues at Chalk River, with X-rays and SEM.
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The Kikuchi lines in the SEM image above revealed that the surface was single crystal.
The X-ray showed that the bulk of the crystal was also single crystal, although the spots were not very sharp.
Rutherford Backscattering and Dechanneling
Sounds painful! You aim a very fine beam of ions at the object and then count how many are reflected and their energy (at a particular angle). If the object is amorphous, the beam will hit lots of atoms, so you will get lots of reflected ions. If the object is a well-ordered crystal, and the ion beam is lined up parallel to the rows of atoms, then few ions will hit the atoms and be reflected. (If some atoms are in the channels between the rows, they will deflect the ions and this is called dechanneling). So this technique can determine the amount of surface disorder and can be used to compare the ‘quality’ of the crystals over several microns.
Making the crystal structure symmetrical
Electropolishing
The 2mm disc was cut off a cylinder of grown crystal with a hot wire in oil. It is lined up so that the new disc plane is aligned with a lattice plane. This damages the surface of the disc and knocks atoms out of place several layers deep. It’s hard to improve the really damaged surface, so it’s removed by electropolishing, an electro-chemical method that isn’t as aggressive as the mechanical. I was given the cut crystal by colleagues in another research centre. I did the electropolishing in my lab at Brock and the X-ray diffraction at Brock too.
Annealing
The annealing process involves heating the gold crystal to near it’s melting point in a rarified atmosphere (to prevent foreign atoms in the atmosphere reacting with the crystal), then slowly allowing it to cool. This allows the atoms to relax into the preferred lattice positions at temperatures where they are free to move, and maintain these positions as the crystal slowly cools.
I did the annealing in my lab and the X-ray diffraction at Brock, then went to McMaster U for the SEM.
When the crystal looked improved using the X-ray and SEM observations, it was taken to the Accelerator at Chalk River, for evaluation using the Rutherford Backscattering and Dechanneling techniques.
Conclusions
We were able to conclude from our X-ray, SEM and Dechanneling observations (our close look) that the methods we had used had produced a defect-free, symmetrical gold crystal (perfect and beautiful).
Reflections
When I look back on this work with the gold crystal in the 1970s, I’m not relying solely on my memories of that time, but on the scientific data in my thesis.
[“We both know what memories can bring,
they bring diamonds and rust”,
‘Diamonds and Rust’, Joan Baez, 1975]
It reminded me of Kaya ÖZÇELİK’s paper (ÖZÇELİK, 2023) The Sense of an Ending: A Postmodern Challenge of Truth, opens with “Throughout the history, one of the interests of humankind has always been to search for what reality/truth is, how they are formed, and how they can be tested, and has thus become a matter of debate among scholars from different fields of study such as sociology, psychology, history and literature.” [Note, not physics, or other natural sciences. ] “…To crown it all, reality/truth based on memories can even have potential for misguiding one in his/her present or future deeds in the wrong way just like the protagonist Tony Webster. “
I think this also supports my hypothesis (not only mine) that memories are subject to change. However, in my present work where the composite portrays a jumbled memory, the memory is based on artifacts which do not (noticeably) change with time and so have some material basis.
In his article “The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights from Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience” , Schacter (Schacter, 1999) states” Though often reliable, human memory is also fallible. … It is suggested that memory’s misdeeds can be classified into 7 basic “sins”: transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. The first three sins involve different types of forgetting, the next three refer to different types of distortions, and the final sin concerns intrusive recollections that are difficult to forget. … Although the 7 sins may appear to reflect flaws in system design, it is argued instead that they are by-products of otherwise adaptive features of memory.”
He goes on to mention the duality of memory or its “fragile power” where the positive side of memory enables us to be effective in our everyday lives, such as the retention of skills, such as driving a car, and facts, simple knowledge of our family, friends, family and surroundings. However, “memory also has a darker, more fragile side. People may forget events rapidly or gradually, distort the past in surprising ways, and sometimes experience intrusive recollections of events that they wish they could forget.”
ÖZÇELİK, K. 2023. The Sense of an Ending: A Postmodern Challenge of Truth. World Journal of English Language, 13 62-68.
SCHACTER, D. L. 1999. The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights From Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. The American Psychologist, 22.
