Science or art? A physicist's blurred boundary

The Art of Science: Russell Stoneback’s Vision

Russell Stoneback’s home office in Plano, Texas, is a vibrant space filled with color and creativity. The walls are adorned with canvases that feature bold yellows, neon purples, and deep blues. Some of these pieces are marked by wavy lines, while others display intricate floral-like patterns that seem to blend the styles of M.C. Escher and Georgia O’Keeffe.

What might appear as traditional paintings are actually visual representations of scientific data. Stoneback, a physicist and former professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, uses computer-generated visuals to transform complex scientific measurements into stunning art. His goal is to make the invisible visible, turning abstract concepts into something tangible and beautiful.

“People are often disconnected from physics,” Stoneback explains. “It’s all math, and it can be challenging. Usually, when we present science, we lose the wonder and beauty, and it just becomes cold, hard equations.”

Stoneback, who is 45 years old and originally from Austin, has always been passionate about merging science with art. This passion began during his studies at the University of Texas at Austin. While balancing his academic work and construction jobs, he also played guitar in a band. During his senior year, he started building a unique guitar that most musicians wouldn’t recognize — what he later called a “photonic” guitar.

Unlike a traditional acoustic guitar, which relies on vibrating strings and a wooden body to amplify sound waves, Stoneback’s photonic guitar uses electricity and light. He developed an app called Cosmic Guitar that converts light waves into sound, creating a new form of musical expression.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Stoneback earned his master’s and PhD in physics at the University of Texas at Dallas, finishing his PhD in 2009. He spent the next 12 years at the university, designing scientific instruments such as the nanosatellite CubeSat, which flew aboard NASA spacecraft. In 2021, he left the university to start his own business, Cosmic Studio, focused on blending science and art.

One of the challenges Stoneback tackled was how to represent the complex, tangled magnetic fields found around Earth and in space. These fields are difficult to visualize and understand, even for scientists. He developed a software tool called OMMBV (Orthogonal Multipole Magnetic Basis Vectors) that reorients these magnetic fields into linear forms, making them easier to map and analyze.

OMMBV was used by NASA for its ICON mission, which studied the ionosphere, and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to analyze data from COSMIC-2, a constellation of microsatellites launched in 2019. The images generated by OMMBV are not designed for aesthetics but serve as diagnostic tools to verify the software’s accuracy. Each image captures real physical values, translated through carefully crafted color palettes that reflect even the smallest changes in data.

One piece in Stoneback’s collection features glowing orange waves rippling across a variegated background, representing data collected along Earth’s magnetic equator. This equator is not fixed and changes over time and location.

So far, Stoneback has created around 700 unique pieces of art using OMMBV, all based on data from a recent study he coauthored. He hasn’t altered or manipulated the images; they emerge directly from the data itself. The results often surprise him, as the images seem to come together in unexpected ways.

“I don’t have the words for how these images come out,” Stoneback says. “It’s almost shocking that it comes out right because it doesn’t look like something that would just happen.”

Stoneback hopes his work will change how people perceive science, showing it as more than just numbers and equations. During a talk at the 2022 CEDAR Workshop, he noticed a woman in the audience visibly moved by the images he shared.

“I’m still shocked by [the art], especially when I first saw it and the number of times I gasped when these images would pop up,” he adds. “I know it’s science, but when I look at them, it doesn’t look or feel like science. I’m hopeful I can get people to feel some form of connection to that.”