Waterloo Bell – Bell for Kepler

Juggling faith and analysis can be menacing even if it is clownesque. If you will, the “head” and “torso” of Rabinowitch’s recent 3 metre tall Waterloo Bell – Bell for Kepler, approximately one tonne each, seem precariously balanced and about to fall apart and crush the observer. Kepler, the astronomer and royal mathematician, was able to handle his “crisis” or turning point of being by successfully juggling his faith and his scientific analysis. This was all the more surprising when his colleagues such as Galileo and Copernicus were being condemned as heretics.

The Waterloo Bell – Bell for Kepler was purchased by the City of Waterloo to celebrate the past, present and future of the people of Waterloo who are successfully juggling faith communities with burgeoning local scientific development exemplified by the world leading work in theoretical and quantum physics at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute. The Bell will be installed in the Waterloo civic square upon its completion. In the meantime the City has loaned the Bell to the Institute for Quantum Computing on the campus of the University of Waterloo. There the Bell will “marinate” in the intellectual ferment of theoretical physics.

Rabinowitch was able to draw on his inventory of simple shapes those shapes that resembled barrel staves and hoops to create the Bell. Barrels are objects common to both Kepler and to Waterloo.

Johannes Kepler was the royal mathematician. He was asked by merchants to produce a standard analysis of the volume of barrels. He then applied this analysis to the rotation of the planets. Barrels are a major icon for the Waterloo region as both brewing and distilling were the result of the application by the Scottish and German founding immigrants to the local crops. It can be easily argued that these founding faith communities brought technology and were the motivating force to build the University of Waterloo which has spun off more than 800 enterprises, most of them technological in nature.

Through the millennia bells have been used to gather communities for meetings, worship and celebration and to communicate alarm. The Waterloo Bell is a tribute to Waterloo’s faith and intellectual communities, its past, present and future successfully balancing faith and analysis. It can be argued that Rabinowitch has rightly seen the German, Scottish, Mennonite, Presbyterian, agricultural, brewing and distilling history of the Kitchener Waterloo founders of the University of Waterloo and its technological impact on the community industry as an ongoing societal juggling of faith communities and intellectual communities, as well as that juggling by individuals within those communities, including the University of Waterloo and its faculties and schools and associated entities such as the Perimeter Institute, the Institute for Quantum Computing, and the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

The Bell keeps yielding insights. While it was being installed at IQC, one of the theoretical physicists thought that it looked an astronomer’s observatory. That was a new and apt interpretation given the Kepler relationship and that Rabinowitch re-uses cones as the cone of vision, perception, focus, or analysis using microscopes, telescopes and their more sophisticated cousins. The magically double cantilevered Bell can also be seen as an anthropomorphic Kepler off balance but successfully struggling to maintain his balance. The geometry of the sculpture can also be seen as lines of meridian which can be seen to suggest many lines of discussion about the many facetted faiths of pioneers, both historical and contemporary.

Click on the image below for a 3D animation of the Waterloo Bell:

The fabricator was Double R Steel in Kitchener, Ontario.