Have you ever want to meander between two spiral wandflower , or follow in the footsteps of a comet ? Now visitors to southwest Scotland ’s Nith Valley can do just that . Welcome to the “ Crawick Multiverse , ” a monolithic facility created by renowned landscape painting architect Charles Jencks that gives emblematic forcible form to some of our most nonobjective physics theories .
It ’s not the first such garden Jencks has landscaped — he ’s done other science - themed project in Beijing , Edinburgh , and Dublin , among others — but it is possibly the largest and most ambitious , spanning 55 acre . In afascinating farseeing piece at Atlas Obscura , Aline Simone — whose father is famed cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin — line the Multiverse as a mashup of scientific disciplines and styles , coalesce “ the austerity of a Nipponese rock candy garden with the flightiness of an Alexander Calder Mobile River ; an marvelous wedlock of Seussian shapes and GPS precision . ”
The American - carry Jencks , 76 , spent over three year impart his vision to life , bankroll by Duke Richard Buccleuch , who forked over 1 million pounds for the project . Before he took on this massive project , the landscape painting had been waste by a failed ember - excavation operation in the 1980s , pull up stakes a mess of rubble and foul sewage behind . Over the trend of three summers , aid by six humans armed with digger and dump hand truck , Jencks ’ sight for the Crawick Multiverse gradually remove conformation .
His pursuit in landscaping date back to 1990 , when he began helping his wife , Maggie Keswick Jencks ( an expert on Chinese garden ) , with a garden at their house in Dumfries . Tragically , she died of breast cancer five twelvemonth later .
Jencks continued to work throughout her illness on what became the 30 - acreGarden of Cosmic Speculation , and gradually a theme of the origins of the world emerged via his now - hallmark crescent pools , cones , twisty paths and concentrical circles . Today the garden is among the most famous in Great Britain , and boasts Soliton Waves , Quark Walks , and Symmetry Breaks , to name just a few notable element .
The Crawick Multiverse features a “ Void Shelter ” that coil downward to a humble puddle of piddle shaped like an apostrophe . There is a “ Comet Walk , ” a cone-shaped steeple called the Belvedere Finger , matching Harlan F. Stone circles representing the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies , two Black Holes , and an Omphalos — “ a boulder - limned grotto symbolizing Earth ’s mythic omphalos , ” according to Simone . Finally , there is the Multiverse itself , a “ spiraling mound lined with crimson sandstone and mudstone boulders . ”
In her article , Simone distinguish the reactions of a some of the world ’s top theoretic physicists to a particular sneak - preview of Jencks ’ project , including Bernard Carr of Queen Mary University . “ I ’ve spent so many class imagine about it but this is the first time I ’ve actually record it , ” Carr mused , adding , “ Of course , we ’re all in the multiverse . ”
Royal Astronomer Lord Martin Rees aim a minute to ponder the implications of a multiverse for theoretical physics and cosmology :
“ It ’s a speculation which may be true , ” Rees mused about the multiverse . “ I like to cerebrate of it as a fresh Copernican Revolution . We ’ve learned that the Earth ’s not the core of the solar organization . We learned that our solar system is one of zillions of global system in our galaxy . We ’ve learned that our extragalactic nebula is one of zillions of wandflower in the seeable population . But we ’ve get wind now that possibly , our visible universe , vast though it is , is just a tiny part of physical reality . And there may have been other giving bam leading to other cosmoses perhaps quite different from ours . ”
And as Jencks himself has drop a line , “ What is a garden if not a celebration of our place in the universe of discourse ? ” translate the whole thingat Atlas Obscura .
range : ( top ) Omphalos and removed galaxies in the Crawick Multiverse . ( bottom ) A map of the Crawick Multiverse . Both courtesy of Charles Jencks .
[ ViaAtlas Obscura ]
ArchitecturePhysicsScience
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