The installation consists of a 15 metre long river of water running through a tunnel lined with thousands of gold coloured balloons. Visitors are dressed in white boiler suits, protective hats and wellies by 'security chief' Nelly Ben Hayoun and then taken through the tunnel on a small rowing boat guided by professional physicists from Imperial College and Queen Mary University. Passengers hear loud booms and see bright flashes of blue light -- Cherenkov Radiation -- that shake and shudder the gold balloons -- Photomultiplier Tubes -, replicating the real Super-K interactions between neutrinos and atoms of extremely pure water, the effects of a sonic boom, normally faster than the speed of light.
Be the neutrino.
Super K Sonic Boooum:
Tags: art, mad science, space, the future
8 Responses:
I need to go there.
"Ben Hayoun’s portfolio includes a scheme for generating dark matter in your sink"
She takes magnetrons out of microwaves and points them across rooms with people in them. It's sad that she will probably end up hurt and is playing manic pixie science girl, but still.... I wonder if she actually powers the naked magnetrons.
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My High School physics might be a little rusty but I'm pretty sure that pointing a microwave magnetron at water to make it boil isn't creating Dark Energy. It's just normal energy.
Likewise, the expansion of the marshmallow in a vacuum isn't caused by Dark Energy but by differences in pressure of the surrounding air and the air bubbles inside the marshmallow.
Oh, right. It's art!
No, the magnetron isn't running - the wires normally come out the side, and there aren't any. Plus... it's spinning. This is probably just an aquarium pump blowing bubbles into the water.
Also, wow. The mind-blowing stupidity of modern "art" never ceases to amaze me.
Good points. I hope she got rid of the ceramic beryllium and cleaned up its residue, that's a far worse hazard than the cataract risk.
One of those photos is not like the others. I think the photo of the yellow rubber raft in a vast chamber lined with what look like some sort of glass vacuum tubes is from the real facility (before it was completely filled with water), while the photos of the rectangular plastic "rowing boat" being pulled by a rope across the floor with an inch of water around it is from the "art installation". The real project's photo gallery is pretty cool!