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Quantum Chaos on Display in Top Physicists’ Chalk Scrawls

For the photo series Momentum, photographer Alejandro Guijarro shoots the chalkboards used by various quantum mechanics professors around the world, including those at UC Berkeley, Oxford, Stanford, Cambridge and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Those chalkboards, instead of those of, say, biology or algebra professors, appeal to him because like photography, quantum mechanics is known for bending some rules.

“I think they have a lot of things in common in their investigations,” he says.

For example, even though photography is sometimes assumed to be a precise representation of reality, there is also an inherent subjectivity. Each viewer interprets the photo their own way and therefore the photo can have multiple “realities” at the same time.

In the scientific world, certain things are also taken to be certain. No one questions the authority of math when it claims that two plus two equals four, but quantum mechanics says that the observable rules we’re used to don’t hold up at a quantum level.

Professor Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, says that while objects like balls in the observable, or what’s called the “classical” world, are only observed to be traveling one direction when they are thrown, it’s been proven that objects in quantum mechanics can be doing many different things, or traveling several different directions, at the same time.

“In quantum mechanics things are doing what seems impossible,” he says.

Guijarro says the intent of the quantum-photography comparison is to call into question the assumed authority of photography. He wants to challenge the “seeing is believing” mantra and explore the variances that photography provides.

“I’m using photography to question itself,” he says.

Another part of the project centers around the images of erased blackboards. Guijarro likes the way they contradict the rest of the images. Unlike the equations he’s captured that are rational and thought out, the eraser marks are signifiers of unconscious movements. Instead of just being conscious notes of “reality,” or “truth,” he argues that photography is also very much involved in the unconscious, from the photographer’s attraction to a moment, to the visceral feeling of beauty you get when looking through the viewfinder.

“[The conscious and the unconscious] contradict each other but somehow cohabit this space in peaceful harmony,” he says.

Next on the list of other top institutions he’d like to visit are Harvard and Princeton. There’s also a blackboard in Italy he’s trying to track down that’s over 36 feet long. When he finally photographs that board it will be a herculean task to print it out; all the photos for Momentum are printed at the same size as the boards themselves. Guijarro wants viewers to be able to stand in front of the photos like they might stand in front of the boards.

“I hope people have a sense of beauty and frustration at the same time,” he says. “I don’t get anything but I enjoy standing in front of [the photos]. The fight it was makes it interesting.”

All Photos: Alejandro Guijarro