First stop: the liquor store. We run in quickly and she buys a bottle of gin and a bottle of wine. Second stop: the grocery store. We get in and get out with cheddar cheese and avocados. Last stop: Caroline Bowen’s apartment. She makes macaroni and cheese, adding cream cheese by suggestion. It’s creamy and delicious.
She sits down to enjoy her creation. Her black shoes have math equations drawn on them in gold ink. Her fingernails painted golden. A cat is climbing the sleeve of my jacket up to my shoulder.
“Aww, look at him. He likes to touch things,” she says as he bats at the string of my jacket. “He likes to touch and then he’ll bite. “
As if on cue, he bites. “Now he’s just being a dick,” as he bites again.
Caroline Bowen is a physics major, art minor at the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus. She says she doesn’t do much outside of school, but there’s more to Bowen than just school.
“Oh my god! My pens!” Her whole demeanor changes, she is much more excited. “If you did as much homework as I did, you’d wanna write with more interesting utensils, too.”
Behind her is a desk, covered with ink bottles, ranging from the empty to full spectrum. “That’s my budding collection of fountain pen ink.” She flips through a notebook, each page filled with multi-colored notes. Bowen likes writing with fountain pens, especially the flex-tips. “The line width varies and it looks more dynamic and interesting,” she reveals.
In third grade, she had every milky pen. Her next was a set of pilot pens, “the ones with like five colors.” Next was the Staedtler Fineliner, but they didn’t last long since she wrote too hard. Now she’s on to gel pens and fountain pens. But her Holy Grail of pens is the Noodler Flex pens, but they are sometimes temperamental and don’t work as well as Bowen wants them to.
“I like my pens because I’m ADD. Paying attention in lecture is hard, but if you have all these pens to play with, it makes class more fun. When I get a new pen in the mail, I get so into it. I blew about $100 of my birthday money on pens,” she explains. “You can write this about my pen collection: I could talk about pens forever.”
Something catches her from her pen daze. “Aww, he’s so cute.” The cat is sitting on my shoulder and climbs down on to the couch. It’s a small grey cat – more like a kitten – named Niels Bohr Dr Pangloss Bowen. But Niels for short. If you crumple some paper and throw it, he’ll go after it like a dog and a ball. Bowen’s adoration for such an adorable cat is completely justified.
Bowen takes part in something called “study-walking.” She’ll study-walk from her house to anywhere and back. She even has an outfit for study-walking: a sunhat, sunglasses, and a golden fanny pack. The sunglasses may seem redundant with the sunhat, but when she doesn’t wear them, she’s staring at a white piece of paper, which hurts her eyes. It’s not the most efficient way of studying, she tells me, but she writes while she walks, which is important. She doesn’t look back over her notes once she’s done. But neither do her physics friends. “We’ve talked about this. We never look at our notes. They’re just so unorganized, but the pens help.”
She stops again. “Are you going to barf? Don’t you barf on my blanket. Look at that cute, little face. He just looks so content.” Niels is crouched, but ready to heave. It looks like the feeling subsides and Niels wanders away to do other cat things.
Bowen points to a sculpture. It’s a wooden outline of a cube with elastic strings in the open area of the cube. The cube is resting on a wood hearth, next to jars of what look like preserved peaches. “This is about gravitational waves. I love this cube, but I hate it’s up there because he’ll eat it,” she says, eying the cat. One string is already broken due to him. Remember, he likes to touch and bite things.
If you pluck one string, the rest will vibrate. “It’s representing gravitational wave, which I’m not going to act like I fully understand, because I don’t,” Bowen says out loud, then whispers, “I’m not an astrophysicist.”
Bowen took a special arts and design class once. She’s “never had an art class like that, it was awesome.” She took the class because she has a lot of gripes with three dimensional models of things in print and computers. It’s three dimensional but it’s being presented in a two dimensional way. “There’s a whole dimension of information being lost. I could never figure out what was happening with a 3-D thing in a 2-D medium. And it’s so frustrating to me. It doesn’t have to be that way. In making these sculptures, I’m understanding it in a way that works for me,” Bowen explains.
“I’m an art person at the end of the day. Look at my apartment.”
I do.
The apartment is incredibly visually stimulating. Maps of the region. Drawings of all sorts of things. A periodic table. What seem to be windows hanging from the ceiling. Models of molecules are hung from the ceiling by the kitchen. It looks more like a studio than a lab.
“This is not a physic person’s apartment. I’m not good at physics, but I remember being an art student. Physics and math seemed so inaccessible and I could never do that. The truth is, though, if you stop telling yourself that you can’t do it for just five minutes, you’d be surprised at what you can do.”
Everybody learns differently and for people like Bowen, there isn’t much out there for visual learners. “I can’t understand something in physics until I study it enough that I have built a mental model that I can manipulate. That takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of drawing, and more,” she recounts.
“That barrier doesn’t have to be there! It’s 2014, come on y’all!” Bowen demands.
Silence sets in, but almost immediately Caroline is reminded of something and in a sense of urgency she says, “Oh shit! When I was at K. Brew, I brought some broiled salmon in foil. I put it in my backpack and it leaked on a thing of post-it notes. Like one drop and as you flip through the post-it notes, it changed sizes.” Thus sparking inspiration: “So I got this idea. You take overhead transparencies and each page has a progressively larger circle. When you bind it all, those circles together create a hollow sphere.” The sphere represents multiple integrals, with each page being the dx/dy (or derivative).
This is what Caroline wants. She wants the sculptures she makes to be things that teachers can use in a lecture. “You’ve got to hang out with the things you’re learning! Buddy up, drink a beer with it, and chill.” Her goal is to make math and physics more accessible to the masses, not just STEM people. For anybody.
“I believe math is the most beautiful thing in this world. The way everything fits together is just so crazy. If God were real, he’d be a mathematician.”