This set of illustrations was created for a series of four consecutively running features in BBC Focus magazine. Each month Physicist Jeff Forshaw and Professor Brian Cox would tackle the big questions in Physics today such as what the nature of time? What is everything made of? What happened before the big bang? and How will the universe end?
1. The Universal Fabric
As Einstein conceived his Special Theory of Relativity during the early years of the 20th century i wanted to reflect this in the imagery; analogue machinery giving birth to something cosmic. Philip Pullman's Dark Materials Trilogy informed this, as did the work of Master Illustrator François Schuiten
The 'Twin Paradox' - Apparently Time does not tick at a steady rate throughout the universe. So someone speeding around in space ages slower than someone more earthbound, as seen in Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar' - It was good to crack out the old hourglass motif - a bit of a classic in the illustrators toolset.
A Journey to Andromeda our nearest neighboring star system, only a measly 2.5 million light years away. We need to learn how to bend space.
This is about Galileo's Principle of Relativity and the idea that experiments and observations made in a laboratory ‘at rest’ give exactly the same results as those made in a laboratory that’s moving.
2. Quantum Physics
What happens if you chop something in half, then in half again and keep on going? What do you end up with? Can you keep doing it forever?
Into the rabbit hole of Quarks and Electrons.
This was based on Feynman diagrams, (after the American physicist Richard Feynman) they describe how particles interact with each other.
"It seems that our regular and orderly world is an emergent feature of a seething maelstrom of activity on the subatomic scale".
3. The Rules of the Game
The Universe is built from elementary particles, an idea that has existed since the time of the ancient Greeks
4. Before the Big Bang
The Big Bang and what came before. This was the trickiest set to illustrate, with a lot of scientific subject matter it's impossible to depict in any kind of accuracy as often the only way it can be properly understood is through maths. So the only option is to go abstract and try and give a sense of it...
The Multiverse.
