We Look at Big Things and Small Things at Rutgers Day

We went over to Busch campus for this year's Rutgers Day, and the highlights were getting a tour of the electron microscope-- it's one of a kind, cost 5.2 million dollars, and is "one of the best in the world"-- and while the microscope itself is incredibly cool looking-- very steam punk-- the results of the microscope, seeing gold atoms magnified a billion times, isn't as excellent as it sounds because the "atoms" are just little moving blips on a really big computer monitor (I don't know what I expected to see . . . little blips with AU tattooed on their butts?) but even better than the microscope was the presentation by a psychologist with the excellent name of Thomas Papathomas, who studies the top down and bottom up nature of our visual system . . . how our eyes feed our brain and our brain feeds our eyes, and he said that he finds the best way to study this is to look at when our brain makes mistakes . . . and then he presented us with a phenomenal bunch of optical illusions, and he had the actual gigantic three-dimensional models of these things, and they were mind boggling . . . I will put some videos up here of what we saw, and you can see some original artwork that uses these ideas at the Patrick Hughes show at the Flowers Gallery in Chelsea, which I am definitely going to attend . . . anyway, I hope you enjoy the videos.