Forbidden Regions
January 27 - February 28
Forbidden Regions is a collaborative project between Eric Edlund, an experimental physicist from the Physics Department at SUNY Cortland, and Jaroslava Prihodova, visual artist and director of the Dowd Gallery at SUNY Cortland. The series of drawings capture the integrated motion of an experimental device created by Eric Edlund to model microscopic quantum mechanical systems on a macroscopic scale using hanging masses and springs. A sequence of coupled pendula, spanning 20 feet, is driven with a continuous pattern of oscillations at variable frequencies. A spatially varying electric potential, as may be found in an atom, for example, is represented by a variation in the length of the pendula. This non-uniformity leads to wave tunneling, the process whereby quantum particles can pass through forbidden regions, and illustrates the nature of radioactive decay, among other phenomena.
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