#hunter longe

Eindexamen Expositie; Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam

De Piet Zwart eindpresentatie vind dit jaar plaats in een kantoorgebouw, geen eenvoudige plek als je bedenkt dat de tentoonstelling normaliter plaatsvind bij Tent. De white cube die de deelnemers misschien verwacht hadden werd een suffige 18e of 20e etage. Toch is dit voor de bezoeker helemaal niet storend. Natuurlijk, het uitzicht over de stad Rotterdam is soms even verleidelijk als de werken…

No Dreams, No Logic

A human lies with eyes open, in a bedroom, a vacuum, walls and floors lined with the most light absorbent material, the blackest black, retinas replaced with the retinas of a frog. In the center of the long dark room is a barrier, a wall with two slits cut in it. At one end, opposite the para-human, beyond the barrier, is a light source. Bars of light and bars of the absence of light — shadows cast through the two slits —collect in alternating soft stripes on the wall behind the human, brightest in the center and progressively dimmer as they repeat out to the edges. The bedroom is stretched to one hundred million kilometers long. The light’s intensity is greatest near its source. Here, photons are most densely packed together, but at the other end of the room, the space between the billions of photons emitted has grown so big that they can be individually perceived as flickering blips by the frog retinae. To a human without these amphibian eyes, it would appear to be dark. A button is pressed. The bedroom is bedroom-size again. The wall behind the human, with stripes of light and shadow cast on it, opens to reveal a photomultiplier (PMT), a vacuum phototube light detector much more sensitive than a frog retina. The light is dimmed and a green filter is placed in front causing the rate of green photons passing through to drop dramatically. Though the PMT detects millions of photon events per second, it can tell that only one photon at time is in the chamber. Peering at the millions of blips accumulating in dotted stripes on the PMT, the homo-anura ponders why, when individual photons pass through the two slits, they do not agglomerate in two lines. There is no such thing as individual. She slumps over in a wash of red dots. The standing world becomes the lying down world. With eyes closed the augmented human sees shadow photons — those invisible partners of the palpable photons that must be passing through the opposite slit and colliding with the visible photons before they hit the PMT, thus causing even lone energy particles to accumulate as an interference pattern on the glass of the photomultiplier. And those invisible photons exist in a parallel invisible universe that the human now sees. It is therefore the lying down world, through the mind’s frog eye, that offers passage to the plural universe: the pluriverse.

- Hunter Longe, May 2015.

Hunter Longe

HOME-WORK #3 : No Dreams, No Logic

light installation, LED strip lights, foam board, fabric, slide projector, fan,1,33 x 1,21 m

Visible from March 2nd to May 17th 2015, from nightfall to midnight.

Note on the double slit experiment

Many iterations of the “double slit experiment” have been used to demonstrate various and changing attributes of light and particles over the last two centuries. In early versions, monochromatic light was directed at a barrier with two parallel slits in it. A screen on the other side would catch not two bars of light, but alternating stripes of light and shadow. This is explained as an interference pattern in which the beams of light, after passing through the slits, interfere with one another causing multiple lines of light. When two more slits are cut in the barrier, fewer lines of light appear on the other side. Initially this exhibited that light functions like a wave. A similar same set-up was used again in early quantum mechanics to demonstrate wave-particle duality — the postulate that particles in a group act like a wave. An experiment was done in which individual photons were fired at a barrier with two and then four slits. After thousands of photons events are detected at the screen, the same interference pattern is revealed — photons only hit the screen in particular places leaving gaps between more condensed areas, like the stripes of light and shadow from the early experiments (see video by Dr. Tonomura of the same experiment done with electrons). The conclusion is that there must be some invisible attribute of the particle that causes interference, that causes it to have this wave-function. In his book, Fabric of Reality, physicist David Deutsch refers to the invisible interference-causing entities as “shadow photons.” He explains that in these light experiments, “there can be places in a shadow-pattern that go dark when new openings are made in the barrier casting the shadow. This remains true when the experiment is performed with individual particles. A chain of reasoning based on this fact rules out the possibility that the universe we see around us constitutes the whole of reality.” This logic takes quantum theorists to the notion of the multiverse. If every photon has a “shadow photon,” that shadow photon must also have a shadow photon and every one of those shadow photons must exist its own shadow universe. Deutsch says, “In fact the whole of physical reality is a multiverse that contains vast numbers of parallel universes” (Deutstch,1997).