Planets in My Head, Physics

Yinka Shonibare’s Planets in My Head, Physics celebrates the mystery of the night sky and the thrill of discovery. Here, a curious young girl, wearing high-top button shoes and a Victorian dress cut from Colonialist fabric, steps upon a wooden case to peer through a telescope into the vast beyond. Her head, a black celestial globe, dances with the names of physicists and astronomers. Like us, she is the inheritor of knowledge gleaned through centuries of time by scholars from every part of the world. Archimedes, Galileo, Einstein and Hawking are there, as are Shen Kuo, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Yoshio Nishina and Brahmagupta. Additional works in Shonibare’s Planets in My Head series include Arts and Literature.

Names of Physicists and Astronomers on Shonibare’s Celestial Globe Head:

Nicolaus Copernicus, Democritus Donald, Edwards Marcelo, Danny de Sousa, Samos Al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham, Hippolyte Louis Fizeau, Enrique Lodel Palumbo, Ghulam Murtaza, Leo Esaki, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Charles Edouard Guillaume, Archimedes of Syracuse, Brahmagupta, Abdul Hameed Nayyar, Dignaga, Zhang Heng, Hafeez-ur-Rehman Hoorani, Lev Gorkov, Leucippus, Yuval Ne’eman, Richard Gans, Herman Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholz, Hideki Yukawa, Albert Einstein, Thomas Alva Edison, Slu Shen, Claudius Ptolemaeus, Al-Kindi (Abu Yusef Yaqoub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi), Sir Leonard George Holden Huxley, Pakudha Katyayana, Hugh Le Caine, William Henry Eccles, Su Song, Nikola Tesla, Hans Bethe, Keith Alexander Nugent, John McNeil Hunter, Gan De, Hipparchos, Ashok Das, Rutherford Adkins, Mohammed Masud Ahmad, Sir Marcus ‘Mark’ Laurence Elwin Oliphant, Isaac Newton, Al-Biruni (Abu Rayhan Muhammed ibn Ahmad Biruni), Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius, Stephen William Hawking, G.O.S. Ekhaguere, Galileo Galilei, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Al-Farabi, Al-Tusi, Sir Roger Penrose, Xu Guangqi, Yoichiro Nambu, Sundance Osland Bilson-Thompson, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes, Thomas Young, Sima Qian, Toshihide Maskawa, Satyendra Nath Bose, Ibn Taymiyah, Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, Terence James Elkins, Shen Kuo, Werner Israel, Leonhard Euler, Pierre-Simon, Marquise de Laplace, Ibn Rushd, Yoshio Nishima, Sir Harrie Stewart Wilson Massey, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Sina, Blaise Pascal, Aiyalam Parameswaran Balachandran, Halson V. Eagleson, Miguel Alcubierre Moya, Dharma Kiru, Behram Kursunoglu, and Sekazi Mungwa