All Possible Paths

This isn't a By-Product, by my definition, it is a full-scale Product, because it's a fairly large piece of acrylic work. And it's intended for art galleries or shows. It's another of my geometric abstractions, and in this one there is only one straight line. This also took a long time to produce, because I had to solve many technical problems about paint, color, and blending. It ended up being in many different techniques, ranging from hand-painted acrylic to texture blending to spray paint. Some solutions were rougher than I might have wanted. But I finally got it done.

The theme comes from quantum physics. One concept in this arcane way of physics knowledge states that a subatomic particle's position and momentum cannot both be known at the same time. And in fact a particle's position is best represented statistically rather than classically. It isn't in one clear point in space, the way a tree or a wineglass would be. It exists in a "cloud of probability" which cannot be reduced to certainty. And when one of these particles moves from one point to another, it doesn't just travel from A to B in a straight line. According to quantum physics (as I understand it...physicist readers, please correct me if I am mistaken!) a particle such as an electron will take all possible paths (hence the title) through space to get to its destination, and we the observers will never know which path it took until we measure it and thus force it to give evidence of passing through a specified position.

The puff of orange at the lower left represents the "cloud of probability" of a single subatomic particle. The orange line diagonally across the painting represents what would happen in the "classical" world, where something moves directly in a Newtonian straight line through space. The orange square in the upper right is the "destination" of our moving particle, where it was detected. All the blue curved lines and wave shapes in the rest of the painting are the many paths (some say even many universes) where our traveling particle might have been. That orange line also is in the form of a "Feynman diagram," a visualization tool invented by that famous scientist guy which allows physicists to diagram how particles move, interact, collide and break apart, and emit other particles.

"All Possible Paths" is acrylic on primed Masonite board, 20" x 16", April 2011. Click on the picture for a larger view. Whew, I'm glad this one is done.