artist Anastassia Elias creates miniature art that fits inside toilet-paper rolls.
Anastassia Elias’ Pyramide
Using a focused ion beam, artist Vik Muniz etches nanoscale artwork on grains of sand.
Vik Muniz’s Sand Castle #3
What might these art pieces have to do with, say, making nighttime driving safer? At first glance, not much. But the same cognitive processes were at work when a baffling problem about windshields was solved. Early in the automobile age, riding around after dark was dangerous because of the blinding glare caused by approaching headlights. American inventor Edwin Land was determined to create glare-resistant windshields. To increase visibility, he turned to the idea of polarization. It wasn’t a new concept: during the reign of Napoleon, a French engineer had noticed that the sunny reflections of palace windows were less brilliant if he looked at them through a calcite crystal. But there was a problem. Several generations of inventors had struggled to put large crystals to practical use. Imagine a windshield made up of six-inch-thick crystals: you wouldn’t be able to see through it.
Like everyone before him, Land tried working with large crystals but got nowhere. Then one day he had his A-ha moment: shrink the crystals. What Land later described as his “orthogonal thinking”1 involved the same mental process as the diminutive artwork of Giacometti, Elias, and Muniz. Turning the crystals from something you held in your hand to something you couldn’t see, he soon succeeded in making sheets of glass with thousands of tiny crystals embedded inside them. Because the crystals were so microscopically small, the glass was both transparent and cut down on the glare. The driver got a better view of the road – and the creativity that produced it remained invisible.
The view through an unpolarized windshield and Land’s polarized one
Like size, shape can bend. In classical Western ballet, dancers’ postures create straight lines as much as possible. Starting in the 1920s, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham used innovative poses, movements and fabric to bend the human form.
As dancers can change shape, so can structures. Using computer modeling and new building materials, architect Frank Gehry warps the normally flat planes of building exteriors into rippling and twisting facades.
Three buildings by Frank Gehry: Beekman Tower
The Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health
Dancing House (with Vlado Milunić)
Volute’s conforming fuel tank
How might a similar bend allow the cars of the future to hold more fuel? One of the impediments to converting engines from gasoline to hydrogen is the bulkiness of the tank: standard hydrogen tanks are barrel-shaped and take up too much cargo space. A company called Volute has developed a conforming tank that folds upon itself in layers and can snake into unused space in the car body, finding ways to make the volume work by bending and twisting it.
Human brains bend archetypes with endless variety. For instance, artist Claes Oldenburg (co-creator of the giant shuttlecocks) not only bent big, he bent soft: in place of marble or stone, he fabricated sculptures from flexible materials such as vinyl and fabric. His oversize Icebag incorporates a motor that makes the sculpture expand and contract – something solid marble cannot do.
Like sculptures, robots have traditionally been hard-bodied: from Robot B-9 in Lost in Space to the automated welders on today’s factory floors, robots are steel-clad helpmates. Their glistening frames are durable, but there are drawbacks: metal parts are heavy and take a good deal of energy to move; it is also hard for metal robots to lift and grasp delicate objects without crushing them. Otherlab is a company experimenting with soft robotics. In place of metals, they use lightweight and inexpensive fabric. The company’s inflatable robots are much lighter than conventional models and use less battery power – yet their Ant-roach robot can walk and support more than ten times its weight. Soft robotics has opened up a host of new possibilities: researchers have built squishy robots that can wiggle and crawl like earthworms and caterpillars, enabling them to navigate terrain that would trip up or trap a metal robot; the delicate grasp of other soft robots enables them to handle fresh eggs and living tissue, which would be crushed by a metal grip.
Otherlab’s Ant-roach robot
Brains constantly play variations on a theme, and that includes our experience of time. The Keystone Cops used fast motion to exaggerate their cinematic pratfalls. The movie Bonnie and Clyde used slow motion to make a balletic death scene as the criminals were being mowed down in a hailstorm of police bullets. The film 300 alternates fast and slow motion to violate temporal predictions in the battle sequences: the warriors hurtle at each other in surprising ways.
The same bend of speed can be used in technology. The continuous flow heart didn’t work perfectly at first, for an unexpected reason: just as eddies form in a flowing stream, clots tend to form where blood flow takes a sharp turn, raising the risk of stroke. After experimenting with different solutions, Frazier and Cohn discovered that modulating the flow speed prevented the blood clots from forming. By programming the pulseless heart to subtly speed up and slow down, they fought back against a potentially lethal problem. In 300, modulating the speed exaggerates the violence; used in the heart, the same bend sustains the breath of life.
And there are other ways to bend time. It usually flows forwards, but not in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. The play tells of a love triangle: Robert’s wife Emma is having an affair with his best friend, Jerry. But Pinter reverses the chronology. The play begins after the affair has ended, when Emma and Jerry meet after several years apart. Over the course of the play’s two hours, the narrative rewinds to the night when, years earlier, Jerry first declared his love for Emma. Each step back in time reveals earlier plans, promises, and reassurances that never materialize. By the time we listen to the characters in the final scene, very little they say to each other feels trustworthy. Pinter has inverted an arrow we normally take for granted, laying bare the roots of a marriage’s destruction.
Brains don’t only rewind time in the theater, but also in the lab. During the Second World War, the Swiss physicist Ernst Stueckelberg realized that he could describe the behavior of a positron (a particle of antimatter) as an electron running backward in time. Although it defies our
