Photographer resolves to capture quantum physics (and in a way, succeeds)
Each blurred theorem, each fragment of quantum physics that appears in Guijarro’s photographs is the specter of a moment.
Blackboards have been the canvasses of great thinkers. Many brilliant minds have succeeded in transferring their ideas onto them. And yet, if they’re stripped of their academic endowment they may become more than just a document, they may even become an intriguing work of art. The Spanish photographer Alejandro Guijarro shows the very thing line between art and the production of scientific knowledge in his work Momentum.
For three years, Guijarro visited many of the most important centers of quantum physics research: Oxford, Cambridge, CERN, The National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Institute of Corpuscular Physics of Valencia. Thanks to his scope, quantum physics becomes, for moments, comprehensible to the rest of us mortals.
scThe photographs document blackboards filled with formulas whose scientific meaning has stoped being relevant. The abstraction is no longer present in the complicated theorems but in the form of the formulas––In the figures that have been stripped of their usual theoretical baggage to emphasize the observer’s role, which (under the premises of quantum physics) is fundamental to the understanding of a phenomenon.
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