Superposition
Imagine a coin spinning on a table. If we stop it, it becomes either heads or tails, but up until that moment you can think of is as being both heads and tails at the same time. In quantum physics this combined state is called 'superposition'.
Superposition is an art project commissioned by Quantum Arc (the Scottish Research Alliance for Challenges in Quantum Technologies). The project is a unique public engagement installation that improves awareness and understanding of the physics behind quantum technologies.
The installation, created by artist Gregor Harvie, is a collaboration with the Quantum Theory Group at the University of Glasgow intended to provoke, inspire and inform a diverse audience about the principles behind two of the founding concepts of quantum physics – superposition and entanglement.
The installation builds on the idea of spinning coins, which are neither heads nor tails until the spinning stops, as an analogy for superposition. 8 pairs of artworks spin at 400rpm so the images on their two sides merge into a new superposition of art. When they stop, the panels in each pair show the same face three quarters of the time, rather than half the time as you would expect. This suggests they must be connected in some way - their behaviour is entangled.
The installation is a reimagining of the Bell Inequality - one of the most important experiments of the 20th century which is generally accepted as proving quantum physics is an accurate description of reality.
Like maths, the equations of physics are balances, one side must equal the other, and being equal, if you subtract one side from the other you are left with nothing.
This idea of nothingness repeats throughout physics; a universe that came from nothing and will go back to it, the annihilation of matter and anti-matter, the continual reduction of our world into massless, dimensionless packets of energy, the implication that ultimately, there is nothing there.
The particles that form our universe take up only 2.8 x 10^-44% of its volume. That’s 0.0 then another forty two 0s 28%. In other words, the universe is almost entirely space.
Artists are also keenly aware of this idea of nothingness; a metaphor for the human condition and the void at the heart of existence - the meaninglessness of life. But it also represents a state of potential, a space for contemplation, for mindfulness, being at one with the universe. Far from empty, it is full of meaning, of possibility and presence.
Nothingness is embodied in my art by holes. Thousands of holes, meticulously cut through thin sheets of aluminium, reducing the world to tiny packets of negative space. They are both precise and elusive, each hole a discrete event, but combining to reveal recognisable features; lines, waves and circles; constellations of voids; a duality of one-dimensional, singular points and two-dimensional flowing forms.
They have a materiality, a physicality that is real and present. A series of ruptures, punctures, punctuations that break through traditional notions of the painted surface, of front and back. Instead inviting us to look through, to consider what lies beyond, introducing the third dimension of depth.
The two sides, apparently different, are actually mirror images, inversions, handed views of the same pattern, each side an echo of the other. But when the panels start to spin, everything changes. The holes tunnel through space, extruding circular paths that introduce the fourth dimension of time. Spinning at speed, the two faces merge to conjure symmetry where previously there was opposition; a superposition of art that is not one side or the other, but both at once.
In this dynamic state, there is a confusion of forms, some discrete and localised with definite positions, others spreading, overlapping, leaping from one position to another, moving as if alive, jumping between states, leaving ghosts of forms lingering in the mind’s eye like the flickering of an old movie.
This is not just an object, but an experience of being. The viewer is witness not to a fixed image, but to an evolving event, where perception becomes entangled with the artwork's behaviour. It’s your mind that makes the image, the form. It only exists through your act of observation. The object itself is unchanged.
When the spinning stops, the patterns separate again into front and back, left and right, their symmetry broken. The art is just space again – there is nothing there.
But here’s the trick. Each panel has an identical twin, and the twins should follow the 50/50 rule of heads or tails. Half the time the twins should show the same side when they stop and half the time the opposite side. But they resist this logic and instead show the same side three quarters of the time. There must be a connection between them, like identical twins who instinctively know how the other feels.
This counterintuitive behaviour is a recreation of the strange and beautiful mechanics that underpin the fabric of existence and that were revealed by the revolutionary "Bell inequality". Physicist John Bell identified an inequality - a statistical anomaly - that could only exist if the weird mathematical predictions of quantum physics were an accurate description of reality; if particles actually did behave in the 'spooky' ways Einstein could not bring himself to believe. Experiments later found this inequality in quantum systems - pairs of particles could be 'entangled' and their behaviour would subsequently co-ordinate no matter how far apart they were. This was impossible in classical physics, it could only exist in a quantum world. This discovery meant quantum physics was true.
The implications and impacts of this extraordinary experiment are still emerging. It has shattered our classical understanding of realism, of fundamental ideas like cause and effect. It changed our understanding of our place in the universe and paved the way for revolutionary technologies that will change our capabilities for ever.
