Hide and Seek
The elusive nature of reality has been a topic of fascination for humanity throughout history. From science to religion, art to philosophy, humans have sought to uncover the truth about our existence and the universe we live in, constructing elaborate theories and philosophies. Yet, the more we discover, the more elusive reality seems to become!
Plato's allegory of the cave is a powerful philosophical example of realising our inherent limitations. In this allegory, a group of people are chained in a cave and can only see shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The prisoners believe these shadows to be the only reality, as they have never experienced anything beyond the cave. However, when one of them is freed and sees the true world outside the cave, they realize, that the shadows were merely a "fragmented" and "reduced" representation of reality.
In the past century, the remarkable field of quantum mechanics has come to confirm our intuition about the inaccessibility of the truth. Uncertainty, entanglement, superposition, quantum measurement, these quantum oddities revolutionised the way we think about the universe, setting robust limits to what we can and cannot access. Nature has "revealed" itself to be a sea of probabilities that materialize only by interacting with the rest of the world! In other words, particles, the building blocks of the universe, exist in many different states simultaneouly, but when we try to measure them, they "collapse" to one definite state, becoming classical. It is clear that nature establishes a barrier between the quantum and the classical world, rendering us unable to access its quantum state and observe, or explain that transition.
The most famous manifestation of quantum weirdness is -without a doubt- Schroedinger's cat. In this thought experiment, a cat is trapped in a small box, containing a radioactive material. Since radioactivity is a quantum phenomenon, it is truly random. And while the cat's fate is linked to that truly random event, as long as we do not open the box -thus interact with the system- the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.
Drawing inspiration from the elusiveness of nature, illustrated in the concepts above, my group decided to create an installation that mimics the experience of a curious scientist - or philosopher- trying to "take a peek" at the universe.
Imagine you're in the dark. You see lights blinking, behind a curtain. There's a shadow (which, coincidentally looks like a cat!).You reach out, trying to figure out what is behind the curtain. You open the curtain, and the lights dissapear! Can't be! You close the curtain and take a few steps back. There they are, blinking again! Open the curtain, poof! Close it again, they appear! This feeling of curiosity and frustration is what we're confronted with, trying to understand nature. And it is also what gets us going!
P.S.: If you are lucky enough, you might catch a glimpse of what's behind the curtains. Spoiler alert: It's a cat! Congratsulations, you caught it alive!