An artistic exploration of quantum physics
Each of the 16 art pieces is made from an aluminium panel with hundreds of precisely drilled holes arranged into patterns of lines, waves and circles. One side is white; the other is coloured. When someone approaches, they begin to spin.
At 400rpm, the holes trace circular paths through space, and the two faces appear to merge, creating a new symmetrical, three-dimensional form that is neither one side nor the other, but both at once; a “superposition” of art. The patterns become ghosts, points become waves, forms appear to move between different states. What was a solid, recognisable object, becomes something elusive that only really exists in the mind of the viewer. The artwork is no longer simply being looked at, the act of looking has become part of the work.
When the spinning stops, the strange forms vanish, instead showing just one side - a static pattern of holes. This is an analogy for “superposition” in quantum physics, in which quantum systems can exist in multiple states at the same time, only collapsing into a single state when they are measured - like a spinning coin that is both heads and tails until it is stopped.
The stopping positions of the artworks are random, and over time most pairs of panels show the same side as their partner half the time. But the eighth pair behaves differently. Individually, its two panels still appear to stop randomly, but when they are seen together something remarkable is revealed: they show the same sides three quarters of the time, and that should not be possible. This is an artistic recreation of one of the most profound ideas in quantum physics: “entanglement”, which allows the behaviour of particles to correlate no matter how far apart they are.
"I wanted to make something you could stand in front of and genuinely not know what you are looking at," said artist Gregor Harvie. "The artworks are made of holes, so in a way there is nothing there. But spun fast enough they transform into something remarkable, something the eye can't quite hold onto. Their form changes depending on where you are looking at them from, and one pair behaves in a way that defies logic. This is the closest I can get to putting people inside the quantum universe."
Stephen Barnett, Professor of Theoretical Physics (Physics & Astronomy) at the University of Glasgow said: “Quantum physics challenges our most basic ideas about what it means for something to have a definite state. It tells us reality is stranger than anything we encounter in everyday life. What I find exciting about Gregor’s work is that it allows everyone to experience that strangeness and to question what they are seeing.”
A century of uncertainty
The installation is being presented 100 years after Erwin Schrödinger published the equation that became one of the foundations of modern quantum physics. A century later, quantum physics remains one of the most successful, and yet most unsettling and least understood descriptions of reality.
It tells us that, at the smallest scale, the universe does not behave in the predictable way we might expect. Quantum systems can exist in combinations of possible states simultaneously and collapse randomly into a single state when they are measured.
For Gregor, this randomness is not simply a scientific curiosity. It raises a much larger question. Classical physics offered a clockwork universe governed by cause and effect. In the famous thought experiment of Laplace’s Demon, an intelligence which knew every detail of the universe could, in principle, calculate its entire future. Quantum physics says that is impossible. Some things cannot be known, and some outcomes are genuinely unpredictable. That uncertainty can be unsettling, but it can also be liberating and optimistic, allowing room for creativity and choice.
Quantum physics
Quantum physics is the branch of physics that describes how nature behaves at the smallest scales, such as atoms, electrons and photons. At this level, the familiar rules of everyday physics no longer give the whole picture. Instead, particles can behave in ways that seem very strange compared with objects we experience in everyday life.
Superposition
One of the most surprising ideas in quantum physics is superposition. A quantum object such as an electron can exist in a combination of different possible states at the same time, until a measurement is made. For example, an electron can have a combination of different possible “spin” states rather than having just one definite state. This does not simply mean that we do not know which state it is in; its behaviour genuinely includes several possibilities at the same time. But when a measurement is made, we only find one particular state. A useful analogy for superposition is a spinning coin: while it’s spinning, we can describe it in terms of the probabilities of it landing heads or tails, and when it stops we see just one result.
Entanglement
Another remarkable idea is entanglement. Two quantum particles can become linked so their properties are described by a single quantum state, even when they are a very long way apart. Measuring one particle can then tell us something about the result we will get from measuring the other. The correlations between entangled particles can be much stronger than is possible with ordinary objects. Imagine tossing two coins and knowing that if one is heads, the other must also be heads, no matter how far apart they are.
Einstein did not believe it, saying, “God doesn’t play dice”, but in the 1960s, physicist John Bell identified a correlation between entangled particles that classical physics suggested was impossible. This “inequality” was subsequently found experimentally, and this is accepted by many physicists as proving that quantum physics is correct.
Schrödinger
Published in 1926, the Schrödinger equation describes how the state of a quantum system changes over time. It plays the same role in quantum physics as Newton's second law (F = ma) plays in classical physics. But instead of predicting the location of a particle, it calculates a wave function giving the probability of finding it at a specific location. Contrary to popular belief, Schrödinger did not think cats could be half-alive and half-dead at the same time. He was simply explaining the absurdity of applying the rules of quantum physics to everyday objects.
