One of thefeatured artists at the Workshop, Steve Deihl, has long worked to depictphysical constants in his drawings. Forexample, his constants series describes mathematical and physical constants,mixing numerical description with pictures of his design. In this series of prints, Deihls imageentitled e depicts the base of naturallogarithmsa concept familiar to any first year calculus student, and alsoreflected in the structure of the world around us.

According toDeihl, e is found to occurnaturally in spirals whose forms are self-similar and geometrically compoundupon themselves, exactly as interest does in banking. While e can be approximated by the number 2.718 , what would it looklike in a picture? Deihl suggests thatartists can get inspiration for such depictions by natural manifestations of e, apparent in the shape of suchseemingly disparate things as sunflowers, the nautilus shell, and galacticspirals.

At the ParisWorkshop, Deihl will extend his notions about universal physical constants thatare also laden with aesthetic qualities as he discusses his new RainbowProject. When white light is passedthrough a prismor in nature, through droplets of water suspended in theatmosphereit is dispersed into the colors of the spectrum. The result is an image symbolized throughoutEarth, reflecting such different meanings as the power of hope and the value ofdiversity.

Deihl suggeststhat extraterrestrials who are savvy about basic optics should also be familiarwith the rainbow. And while one mightdepict the rainbow numerically or through visual images, as he did in hisconstants series, he suggests a radically different approach designed fortechnologies currently used in SETI.Rather than depicting a rainbow with pencil and paper, he suggests transmittingat radio frequencies that are physically related to the frequencies of colorsin the spectrum. Using this approach,even extraterrestrials who dont navigate through their environments courtesyof vision might gain clues to how humans literally see the world.

Anotherparticipant of the Paris Workshop, physicist Lui Lam, suggests that anyextraterrestrial capable of interstellar communication will likely be familiarwith fundamental notions of complexity.In Lams view, Like us, being a complex system, an ETI[extraterrestrial intelligence] will recognize immediately the property ofself-similarity, the principle behind fractals, which exist ubiquitously overmany scales on Earth and anywhere else in the universe.

As an example,Lam describes a very simple fractal: the SierpinskiGasket. This fractal is constructed by starting with an triangle having allsides of equal length. In the middle ofthis triangle, a smaller triangle is cut out, leaving three other trianglesat the corners of the original triangle.This process can be repeated over and over, without end. The result is a mathematically elegantfigure that can be expressed very simply in computer code.

The SierpinskiGasket also shows the connection between art and mathematics. A survey of European art, for example, showsmany designs very similar to this fractal.Might a simple mathematic description of a repeating series such as theSierpinski Gasket give ET a clue to some of our notions of beauty? If aliens share the taste of certain earlyItalian artists, the answer may be yes.

As highlyvisual creatures, it may be natural for humans to think of the connectionbetween art and mathematics in pictorial terms. Another alternative to be discussed at the Paris Workshop,however, is music. Even in ancientGreece, Pythagorean philosophers expounded on the mathematical nature of music. In Paris, the Dutch astronomer and computerscientist Alexander Ollongren will bring the discussion to the present, andpossibly into the future, as he suggests a method for communicating musicthrough interstellar messages.

Ollongrenswork is an extension of the late Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthalsinterstellar language, named LinguaCosmica, or Lincos forshort. Using the presumably universallanguage of mathematics and logic, Ollongren will help nudge participants awayfrom the largely American and European involvement with SETI, bringing inanother perspective by illustrating his proposal with music from an IndonesianGamelan orchestra. Though Ollongren haslived and worked much of his life in the Netherlands, he was raised in Indonesia,and he and his wife began playing in a Gamelan orchestra for several years inthe mid-1980s. In Paris, he willillustrate his coding scheme with musical selections played by him and hiswife.

The domestictone of Ollongrens music will be consonant with the atmosphere of theWorkshop. Roger Malina, Chairman of theBoard of one of the Workshops other sponsors, Leonardo/InternationalSociety for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, describes the setting of theWorkshop. To be held in a privateresidence in the Paris suburb of Boulogne Billancourt, Malina anticipates thatthe Workshop will provide an intimate family setting that encouragesexcellent discussions and productive work.Because of space limitations, the Workshop will be closed to the public,and there will be very limited room for the press, by invitation only.

This one-dayWorkshop is the second in a series of Workshops on interstellar messagecomposition being organized by the SETI Institute. The first of these meetings was organized by the SETI Institutelast autumn in Toulouse, France, and will be summarized in Paris by one of theWorkshop participants, Italian philosopher of science Paolo Musso.

Workshop on the Art andScience of Interstellar Message Composition

SETI Institute