Grace Hopper, a computer scientist and US Navy Rear Admiral, used wire to visualise very short durations of time in computing. Each wire is cut to the maximum distance that light or electricity can travel in a nanosecond, one billionth of a second. She wanted programmers to understand 'just what they're throwing away when they throw away a millisecond', and describes using them to help military commanders understand why signals take so long to relay via satellite. This lecture was given at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on 25 April 1985 (video above); she used the short wires as a visual teaching method from the late 60s. A bundle of her nanosecond wires are in the Smithsonian Museum (left photo above). From the Smithsonian Collection Website, under a CC0 license: This bundle consists of about one hundred pieces of plastic-coated wire, each about 30 cm (11.8 in) long. Each piece of wire represents the distance an electrical signal travels in a nanosecond, one billionth of a second. Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992), a mathematician who became a naval officer and computer scientist during World War II, started distributing these wire "nanoseconds" in the late 1960s in order to demonstrate how designing smaller components would produce faster computers. The "nanoseconds" in this bundle were among those Hopper brought with her to hand out to Smithsonian docents at a March 1985 lecture at NMAH. Later, as components shrank and computer speeds increased, Hopper used grains of pepper to represent the distance electricity traveled in a picosecond, one trillionth of a second (one thousandth of a nanosecond).Reference: Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004. Grace Hopper (1906-1992) was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and invented compilers and machine independant programming languages, which underpin most of modern computing. She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College before joining the Navy reserves during World War II. She was behind the development of COBOL in the 1960s; was the first person to use the phrase 'bug' for programming faults, and was posthumously given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. [Biography summarised from Wikipedia]

Artist Bathsheba Grossman has been 3D printing mathematical surfaces as early as 1997. In 2002 she started to use subsurface laser engraving to produce 3D physical visualizations of data from astronomy, biology, and physics. Left image: a piece of DNA molecule. Right image: a 3D map of our nearby stars. The artist explains to us: This medium excels at imaging less structural data such as disconnected volumes, non-compact point clouds, and the convoluted strands of proteins. It works by projecting intersecting Nd:YAG laser beams into clear glass, concentrating enough energy at the intersection to create a microfracture that is precisely located within the glass. The laser is then pulsed and moved; a typical image might contain from 100,000 to several million marks. The art of the medium is in regulating position and density of the marks so that bright lines and points are produced, as well as surfaces of varying translucency, without concentrating marks so closely as to over stress the glass and produce larger fractures. Sources: http://www.bathsheba.com (2002 version). http://crystalprotein.com

Humanity has been gazing at light from distant stars since time immemorial. But in 2015, our ability to understand the University achieved a major milestone, when ripples in Spacetime itself - instead of light - told the tale of an ancient, cataclysmic collision between black holes. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is an experimental system of almost unbelievable sensitivity. Using interferometer arms four kilometers long, it can detect changes in length as tiny as 1/10,000 the width of a proton. Over a billion years ago, two huge black holes, with a combined mass 60 times that of our Sun, spiraled into each other. This event shook the very fabric of space and time, and about three solar masses were converted completely into energy in the form of gravity waves. These waves have been travelling outwards in all directions at the speed of light, until they were noticed by LIGO, on 14 Sept 2015, first at the installation in Hanford, WA, and milliseconds later at Livingston, LA (GW150914). The LIGO team released a 2D spectrogram of the data, showing how the intensity of the gravity waves at different frequencies changed over the course of the event. In this case, the x-axis is time, the y-axis is frequency, and the intensity is indicated by the color. As predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity, the coalescing of the black holes involved a "ringdown" increase in intensity of the high-frequency components as they spiraled together faster and faster. I (Louis R. Nemzer) converted this spectrogram into a 3D-printed model. This way, the peak is much more apparent, and the primary signal, as well as the background noise, is much easier to appreciate. This event has paved the way for a new era in astronomy, in which gravity wave signals, along with light, will let us peer deeper into the vastness of Space. Sources: "Gravity Wave Spectrogram" by Louis R. Nemzer hosted on Thingiverse Data from the LIGO Open Science Center