What is it?
Interactive: Select a “sphærical Fermion” (steel ball bearing) and gently insert it into the top slot of this machine; as soon as it enters the machine, the front glass becomes a blank mirror. You’re not allowed to see the ball’s progress downwards. It emerges into one of three trays at the bottom of “The Astonishing Oscillator.”
The tiny, smaller-than-atom neutrino has three “flavors,” and changes flavors unpredictably as the neutrino travels. Imagine buying a quart of strawberry ice cream, and by the time you get home, it’s turned into chocolate.
This “oscillation” is a major area of particle physics study, and the DUNE experiment, a massive detector under construction at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, hopes to shed light on it. A beam of neutrinos will be released from Fermilab in Chicago, directed towards the DUNE detector, 800 miles away; a given neutrino will be observed at a “near detector” as it is released, and then again once it reaches DUNE’s “far detector.” Keeping the entire process underground helps filter out extraneous cosmic rays and other background noise.
In “The Astonishing Oscillator,” this neutrino travel is represented with Fermilab and SURF headframe graphics; the steel ball stands in for the neutrino; you pick it from one of the three “flavor trays” and it might emerge as a different flavor.
This machine is new construction, made with Baltic birch plywood, one-way acrylic, and 3D-printed PLA post-processed with stains and waxes. I used a laser cutter to engrave the artwork, layering paint before and after. It contains hundreds of nails.
