GALLERY CVI
The Deep Clock
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
ON THE FLOOR
Charles Horton Cooley
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“You learned who you are by watching what other people reflected back at you. The mirror, it turns out, was people all along.”
ON THE FLOOR
Edward Soja
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“Space is not the stage the story happens on - it is one of the actors. Ask WHERE, and half the mystery answers itself.”
ON THE FLOOR
George Herbert Mead
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“The self is a conversation: the I speaking, the Me listening with everyone else's ears. You rehearse society every time you think.”
BH1-076 · The Deep Clock — Open the drawer
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-077 · The Deep Clock — What is this thing?
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-078 · The Deep Clock — Read the source
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-079 · The Deep Clock — Map it / time it
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-080 · The Deep Clock — Two sources disagree
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-081 · The Deep Clock — State the claim
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-082 · The Deep Clock — Take the other side
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-083 · The Deep Clock — Weigh it
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-084 · The Deep Clock — Build the answer
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-085 · The Deep Clock — For the file
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-086 · The Deep Clock — Go and look
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-087 · The Deep Clock — Now, today
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-088 · The Deep Clock — Teach it back
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-089 · The Deep Clock — The other place
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
BH1-090 · The Deep Clock — One object, close
Radioactive decay is a clock nobody set and nobody can stop.
Becquerel's Plate
A photographic plate with a smudge on it and a shadow of a cross. Becquerel had wrapped it in black paper, put uranium salt on top, and left it in a drawer on a cloudy day. The uranium exposed the plate through the paper with no light at all.
Marie Curie, c. 1920
The woman who named radioactivity, measured it, and found two new elements in a ton of pitchblende sludge, photographed in the years after her second Nobel. The notebooks she wrote in are still too radioactive to handle without gloves.
Pitchblende
A black, heavy, glassy lump of uranium ore. The Curies started with tons of it; a rock like this holds uranium, and, in fixed proportion to its age, the lead the uranium has become. The clock and its face are the same stone.
The Canyon Diablo Iron
A rusted, pitted lump of iron that fell on Arizona 50,000 years ago and made Meteor Crater (in the Moon's Receipt drawer). In 1956 Clair Patterson measured the lead in fragments like this and announced the age of the Earth: 4.55 billion years. The number has barely moved since.
From the gallery’s own wall — “BH1-076 · The Deep Clock — Open the drawer”.
🎧 A moment to consider
What will you carry out of this room?