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What the Chalkboards of Quantum Physicists Look Like

Forget the spray-decay of trillions upon trillions of subatomic particle collisions. Turns out all of physics is a chaotic, entangling, beautiful mess--especially one of its most rudimentary mainstays: the drawing board.

Forget the spray-decay of trillions upon trillions of subatomic particle collisions. Turns out all of physics is a chaotic, entangling, beautiful mess--especially one of its most rudimentary mainstays: the drawing board.

That's the idea behind Momentum, a new photo series by photographer Alejandro Guijarro. Staking out the offices of top-tier quantum physicists at UC-Berkeley, Cambridge, Stanford, Oxford, and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Guijarro caught the mind-melting pushes and pulls of some of the physical world's most elemental questions and mysteries being sussed out, wrestled with, and ultimately undone--erased--from chalk boards.

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He says it's a way for him to both call bullshit on the long-presumed "authority" of the photographic record and to riff off contradictions, which quantum physics, much like "seeing is believing," thrives on.

"I'm using photography to question itself," Guijarro tells Wired.

A beautiful, questioning mess.

All photos courtesy Alejandro Guijarro.  

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