Molecular Planets

The live footage of the talk, including the Q&A, can be viewed on the session page, VISAP: Papers 2.

Abstract

The molecular world is always in motion – molecules are never stationary, their atoms are constantly vibrating due to thermal energies and other external forces. This ongoing motion is the reason that our exhibit is in the form of a mobile – a form of art already used by Alexander Calder, who believed that the mathematical laws of the universe could not be expressed by static art. The idea of mysterious forces holding the universe in balance inspired his mobiles. Likewise, the ever-moving elements of the molecular space are not only invisible, but their shapes are of purely theoretical nature. Visualisation makes the elegance and beauty of the molecular world visible in virtual space by representing molecular models as molecular surfaces portraying the interface between a protein and its environment. Our exhibit not only makes such visualisations transcend into our three-dimensional, tangible space, but also mingles all intermediate mathematical spaces that the idea of molecular surfaces traverse to reach their visual representation into one object. It therefore makes the visualisation process behind the idea of molecular surface maps more tangible by showing the metaphor of a planet being charted.