All Possible Photons: The Conceptual and Cognitive Art of Feynman Diagrams

ET Modern, New York. Until spring 2013; official opening 15 September.

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Before the explosion in 'infographics' describing everything from cocktail mixology to US health-care spending, there was Edward Tufte.

Tufte, a statistician, is perhaps the world's most celebrated information designer. In All Possible Photons at his Manhattan gallery, ET Modern, Tufte has unleashed his love of artistic explanation in a series of sculptures instantly recognizable to anyone with a passing knowledge of particle physics. Minimalist 'graphics' consisting of stainless-steel tubing formed into straight and undulating lines, Tufte's rendering of Feynman diagrams transforms recondite scientific notation into abstract, glinting art. Tufte also plans to show versions more than five metres high at his sculpture park in Woodbury, Connecticut.

US physicist Richard Feynman created elegant traceries of lines, dots and arrows to describe and predict how subatomic particles interact. Feynman was not unaware of his diagrams' aesthetic appeal, and famously drove a van painted with a selection of them.

Edward Tufte adjusts his All Possible 6-Photon Scattering (120 Space-Time Feynman Diagrams) (2012). Credit: A. SEVERNY

Tufte's matt or polished steel sculptures, mounted on the walls, are shorn of explanations as well as much of the detail that makes them scientifically useful, such as arrows and labels. Some are large and dominate their wall space. The most powerful artwork on display is the collection of 120 smaller pieces that give the show its name — a cluster representing all possible space and time paths of a particular interaction of photons. These form what Tufte calls “a complete enumeration of everything that could happen” in that instance.

This isn't the first time Tufte has ventured into Feynman territory. The diagrams feature as models of good design in Tufte's book Beautiful Evidence (Graphics, 2006). They are also referenced in one of his enormous Rocket Science sculptures of fantastical space probes attached to giant bazooka-style launchers. In the Airstream Interplanetary Explorer (2011), the probe is an iconic silvery Airstream caravan adorned with Feynman diagrams. Tufte's contention is that because subatomic particles everywhere in the Universe behave as shown by Feynman diagrams, these could work as communiqués to other worlds. As he has put it, “Better the cosmopolitan verbs of Nature's laws on spacecraft than the local proper nouns of national flags, earthly Gods and Goddesses, and government agency logos.”

By focusing on the diagrams alone, the sculptures in All Possible Photons bring home the power of Feynman's achievement. There is beauty in his diagrams, but the real deal is what they can potentially describe — which is everything.