Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has sent us a note with some more details about the "Atheon," his really cool new installation at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. As we reported earlier, the Atheon "calls forth the fusion of science and religion by building a temple for scientific worship," and it will appear in the 14-foot-high cathedral-style windows on the second floor of the museum's new downtown location while the inside of the building is being renovated.
Keats is now sharing the details of his plan. "The essence of religion is stained glass and song," he says, and the stained glass of the Atheon will be patterned to show the cosmic microwave background radiation—afterglow light from the big bang–which has been mapped and measured by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. "The cosmic microwave background is the sky's natural stained glass, our origin story imprinted on the cosmos," says Keats. "And now it's visible to us for the first time, glowing through the windows of the Atheon."
The accompanying song will be a "canon for three cosmic voices" called "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" Keats musically arranged the song using audio files of sounds "pulsating through several hypothetical universes as well as our own living cosmos" that were produced by University of Virginia astronomer Mark Whittle.
"When you listen to people like Nobel laureate cosmologist Steven Weinberg, or Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, you hear a lot of talk about how god-based religion is out-of-date," says Keats. "The leading minds believe that science can and should provide a spiritually satisfying replacement. But until recently no one bothered to consider what form that alternative might take." Keats says he's "hardly the best person for the job, but if I didn’t take it on, nobody would."
For now, because of the construction work inside the museum, the Atheon will be visible only from the sidewalk, with the windows illuminated every night until February 1. Those who can't make it to the museum will be able to hear the canon and see the glow of the radiation on the Atheon's Web site, meaning they can "turn off their lights and set up a miniature shrine to science on their home computer." The site (www.magnes.org/atheon) is scheduled to go live later this month.
"Eventually there will be an Atheon in every town," says Keats. "There will be many different architectures and diverse liturgies. Science will make a fine religion. What remains to be determined is whether this religion will be good science." —Heather Wax