The Cloud Chamber is a freestanding sculpture in which you see cosmic rays from outer space.  It is an irresistible project, portraying the world at its visible limit. Including myself and my collaborator Dr. Justin Albert, five people work on this project. 

A Solidworks file was made by Kontraptioneering in Brooklyn.   With the file we achieved consensus in the design.  Also, we cut the final form from this file with a 3-axis router. The form is a conjoined polyhedra or “Pullenhedron” spanning 7 feet in length, welded Upstate and shipped to Canada in a slat crate.

Inside the aluminum form is an environmental chamber, designed to sustain atmospheric conditions needed to see a cosmic ray. When it is finished, the work will be installed in the Elliot Lecture Hall at The University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.  Our scheduled completion date is tentatively set for the 2010-2011 academic year.

This project asks questions about direct observation and invisible things in art and science, like a thought, or a particle. Fine art and particle physics share common ground here. A quantum event implies an image.Without an image, there is no event.

The form is not inherently connected to the cosmos. It belongs to a family of forms known as space-filling polyhedra. Our form is a conjoined pair of elongated bi-symmetric sphendecahedron that, like cosmic rays, are not what they appear to be.

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