Principle of uncertainty

installation / Moscow, 2016

The work was created in collaboration with Fedor Ovchinnikov

More and more often the modern science manages to lift the veil of the great mysteries of being and each and every discovery leaves fewer and fewer riddles (Higgs boson, dark matter, gravitational waves, etc.). Transcendence itself began to elude the unknown.

June 15 — June 26, 2016 / group exhibition at "Omelchenko Gallery"

And yet, sometimes the secret have to remain to be a mystery. Proceeding from this, we tried to symbolically. preserve the "principle of uncertainty". A cat is locked in a steel box. Inside the box is the Geiger counter, in which there is a tiny amount of radioactive material, so small that within an hour only one atom can decay, but with the same probability it may not get broken; if this happens, a relay is triggered, releasing the hammer, which breaks the cone with hydrocyanic acid. The first decay of the atom would poison the cat. According to quantum mechanics, if no observation is made over the nucleus, then its state is described by a superposition (blending) of two states — a decaying nucleus and an undissolved nucleus, hence the cat sitting in the box is both alive and dead at the same time. Therefore, the uncertainty initially limited by the atomic world is transformed into macroscopic uncertainty, which can be eliminated by direct observation.

Since it is clear that the cat must necessarily be either dead or alive (there is no state combining life and death), then it will be the same for the atomic nucleus. It must necessarily be either disintegrated or unbroken. Thus, Erwin Schrödinger wanted to show that quantum mechanics is incomplete without some rules that indicate under what conditions the wave function collapse and the cat either becomes dead or remains alive, but ceases to be a mixture of both. Taking into account all of the above, we suggest that the viewer become the observer who will destroy this paradox by looking at what has happened to our poor cat.