Projects

The black body music box project

I appreciate that people do like different things in life. Aesthetics may well be relative, it's all a matter of taste and de gustibus non disputandum — you can pick your favourite cliché.Me, for instance, I think that this curve is truly beautiful. Not only because of what it represents – that is, how much light at every given wavelength an ideal body with a certain temperature will radiate. And honestly, isn't this already a beautiful concept? The hotter a body, the shortest the wavelengths where it emits most of its light (blue, ultraviolet, X-rays...) and viceversa, the colder the body, the longer the wavelengths (red, infrared, microwaves...)But still, I really find that the curve is beautiful by itself.

(again, if you think that I like weird stuff, please go back to the first line)

Physicists call it a black body curve. Turns out it's a very important tool to understand how hot vs. cool objects release their energy.

With all the stuff in the Universe having wildly different temperatures — from a few degrees above absolute zero to millions of degrees and more — the black body curve is also a fundamental tool for astronomers to understand how stars and other cosmic sources of light work.

However, the beauty of this curve (and of its meaning) hardly make it out of the blackboards and papers of scientists.

I decided to do it a better justice.

Therefore, I am preparing some texts and, most importantly, a musical animation to export the black body out of the labs.

The work is in progress – watch this space.

Meanwhile, I realised I have been ranting about this mysterious black body without uttering a single word to explain what it is. This is technically not necessary to fully enjoy the animation (in fact, the animation is supposed to trigger your curiosity to find out more about the black body curve and what it means...) but since there's still no animation, here's a brief intro that I wrote with a colleague some time ago, intended for high-school students. It explains what black body radiation is and why it's important for astronomers: Black Body intro

Thanks to: Arianna Cortesi, Giulia Vannoni, Giovanni Natale, Massimo Viola and Enrica Gatto for useful discussions and collaboration; Image credits: M. Viola & M. Planck