Shadow of the Beginning

"Shadow of the Beginning" December 2015

“Shadow of the Beginning” is my first full leap into the world of visualizing the invisible. In this piece, my aim is to create a truly immersive experience whereby the viewer can "feel" the radiation that moves through him every second of everyday. To achieve this, I have built and elevated a simple, and very old, physics experiment where one can watch the effects, in real time, of cosmic background, stellar, and nuclear radiation. The apparatus you see here is called a “cloud chamber.”
The cloud chamber, also known as the Wilson chamber, is a particle detector used for detecting ionizing radiation. In its most basic form, a cloud chamber is a sealed environment containing a concentrated vapor of isopropanol. When a charged particle (for example, an alpha or beta particle) interacts with the mixture, the vapor is ionized. The resulting ions act as condensation nuclei, around which a mist forms (because the mixture is at or below its dew point). The high energies of alpha and beta particles mean that a trail is left, due to the many ions being produced along the path of those particles. These tracks have distinctive shapes (for example, an alpha particle's track is broad and shows more evidence of deflection by collisions, while an electron's is thinner and straighter). When any uniform magnetic field is applied across the cloud chamber, positively and negatively charged particles will curve in opposite directions, according to the Lorentz force law as it concerns two particles of opposite charge.