Entanglement visualised

This video was a part of the installation exhibited at the UNSW Art & Design Annual Exhibition in November 2014. The installation included not only the video, but also a three sets of sculptures made of porcelain and white stoneware clay.

Three pairs of sculptures

When you measure a particle, you can only look at one property at a time. Three pairs of the sculptures represent three different properties, or in other words, three different measurable observables. The first pair of sculptures is connected by the same weight, which represents the mass of a particle. The second pair of sculptures is connected by similar form, which represents the spin of a particle. The third pair is connected by the touch-light relationship that represents the energy of a particle. These three pairs of sculptures also represent entanglement. When we measure one property of a particle, we can see the effect on the other particle that is how we know that they are entangled.

The video

The video represents the particle that we attempt to measure from all sides, but it is still impossible: we can only see one side at a time, or one property. We will never know the indefinite state of a particle. Once we measure it, it becomes definite; it makes its transition from quantum world to a classical world. There is no way to know what it was like before we measured it. “Quantum states constantly diverge, but measurement collapses multiple possibilities into one” (Simon David Burton, 2014).