elkemental Force

What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? –Richard Feynman

Aharonov-Bohm Effect

It is often called the simplest example of topology impacting physics (Topology like “the shape of space”, like coffee mugs being donuts!). Charged particles move under the the influence of electric and magnetic fields. The concept of fields was once introduced to replace action at a distance: If one charge tugs on another, it does…
Mass Shell

Space and time are rotated into each other. Momentum and energy are as well. This rotation in four dimensions is of an unusual, hyperbolic kind. Which is the source of all so-called paradoxa in special relativity. Best to avoid thinking of clocks, rulers, trains, and observers. Just stick to the geometry. When a classical particle…
Postal Scales Now and Then

I’ve tried to stage it properly. But it just looks sad. Functional – and not inspiring: The white plastic casing already starts to yellow at the top, from years of bombardment with UV photons. Its function in our office had been replaced … by not sending invoices or contracts on paper anymore. Edit: The original…
Poetry: Representations

Finally, a revelation! I was asking myself: Why do I often find ancient, terse, illustration-free textbooks easier to follow than their modern, friendly, playful, illustrated, multi-media-enhanced counterparts? Case in point (and I know that not everybody will agree): Paul Dirac’s legendary Principles of Quantum Mechanics or the definitive course on theoretical physics, the volumes by…
Hello, World – from Code to Canvas

I have promised to report on my progress with presenting my digital art on canvas. but I had been sidetracked by inverted drawings. So, I created a first – and very modest – descriptive geometry drawing by code: I have tried to explain here what this software does; it is very different from my other…
Magneto Compass – Inverted Art

It has been quite a while since I have drawn my antique rotary phone as “negative art”. This phone features white letters on black background. At that time I had no idea that white gel pens exist, for drawing such letters. So, I “invented” inverted art – as usual, only to discover that many artists…
Vintage Temperature Waves

There might be three people among my active followers who still remember when this blog was primarily about hard science and tech – without artistic adornments. These were the glory days of the internet, in the early 2010s. When social media had not yet defeated small blogs. We had our German heat pump and energy…
Dare to Be Negative!

Do you remember analog photo negatives? I still have some, tucked away deep in the archives. I always found them eerie and uncanny. Humans turned into zombies with black teeth. Burnt orange, weird cyan and violet everywhere. But what did I expect? We don’t have an intuition for addition or subtraction of colors. Would you…
Circles to Lines (2026)

Circles and lines – that sounded manageable. So, this was one of my first attempts at reviving descriptive geometry. A circle on a sphere is projected into a circle in the equatorial plane under stereographic projection. But if the source circle contains the North Pole, the projection ray in this point becomes tangent to the…
Drawing With Code

What does it even mean? I see two main ways of drawing with code: 1) going for a representation of a thing you have in mind, or 2) using an algorithm and elements of randomness to surprise you. Representational I have code-drawn Lissajous curves with code – from a picture in mind before I started.…
On Descriptive Geometry

I keep forgetting I am writing for an international audience here! Having referred to Descriptive Geometry (DG) often, I doubt that everybody associates similar mental images with it. Anybody remembering the trace of a plane, for example? Learning about the history and culture of Descriptive Geometry, I realize it is rooted in a European tradition…
Archaic Mathematical Art – and Poetry – from Code

What is the simplest way of creating art with code? I have been using software frameworks for mathematics and graphics in the past year. They “abstract away” how you actually place the dots on the virtual canvas. But I want something ancient, with a clear-cut boundary. My choice is the language C: created in the…
Coping with the AI Apocalypse

Painstakingly, I was putting the finishing touches on my analog geometric art – when this video popped into several of my social media feeds: We Need To Talk About AI… by Cool Worlds Podcast Cool Worlds Podcast is run by a team at Columbia University and usually features guests interviewed by physicist David Kipping. This…
Coffee-Powered Stargate

Let me open the Stargate of Diffraction for you, once again! This is as close as I ever got to a plain scientific visualization: No 3D effects, just the intensity of diffracted radiation as a function of position in space. If you use a sun catcher – a film with a diffraction grating – the…
Rolling Not Slipping – Story of a Twirling Ellipsoid

I can’t help it – I use the first title that pops into my mind! “Rolling, not slipping” is the punchline of a mathematical argument used in classical mechanics, in the theory of the motion of a gyroscope. But I am not going to do it justice in this blog post (apart from a math…
Futuristic T-Shirts for Physics Geeks!

Have I started the elkement.art fashion brand? I have been working on the series Poinsot’s Pixel Spaceship for ages. I have been thinking about releasing wall art, but then I tested a different product – the classical print-on-demand product: T-shirts. And THIS WAS IT! This is the perfect surface I want to print this spaceship-like…
Unearthing a Time Capsule and Preserving a Fading Cathedral

My first creative endeavors (as an adult) were not drawings or paintings. It was the early web that made me pick colors by hand and stitch together HTML code snippets. The web of the early 2000s was a very different place from the modern social media era, built from many small independent sites and blogs,…
elkement Art Spotted in the Real World!

“Modern and Traditional” This sounds like a clichéd slogan. But I cannot get it out of head when I see the photos a customer of my art store kindly has sent me! Digital art created with code (No AI) is as “modern” as it can get. When I initially thought about printing my art, another…