Is There Something Beyond Quarks?
Artwork details
Polina Zhadko · 2022
Oil, acrylic, paper, pin on canvas
73 × 61 cm
About the work
"This is the Particle, Kept in the dark tunnel's gilt, In the Hadron Collider, That CERN built..."
To search for the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons — each proton itself composed of three quarks.
Quarks possess a property physicists call “colour charge,” conventionally labelled red, green and blue. These names do not describe visible colour; the artist borrows them as a visual analogy with the RGB colour model.
Currently, scientists consider quarks to be fundamental particles. But they once believed the same about nucleons, about the atomic nucleus, and about the atom itself.
This leads me to ask: Is there something beyond quarks?
In the artist’s philosophical proposal, the cosmos extending outward is mirrored by a speculative infinity inward: perhaps matter could reveal ever smaller structures.
The painting leaves that possibility as an open question about knowledge, technology and the limits of what we can observe.
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Augmented reality
The artist’s portfolio identifies this painting as part of a series viewable in augmented reality.