The JWST vs. QED series touch on the connectedness of space, time, and light. The drawings originated when I noticed a bowtie like shape in a close-up image I made of the JWST mirror. The shape reminded me, coincidently, of a similar bowtie shape depicted in the famous Feynman Diagrams. These diagrams are representations of quantum electrodynamics (QED), that describe how an electron can emit a charge-carrying photon, which can then be absorbed, slightly later, or slightly earlier, in time, by another electron.
The works are pastel and charcoal drawings of a close-up view of the JWST. They depict a part of the telescope's primary hexagonal gold-plated mirror, with an overlay of a graphic illustration of a Feynman Diagram. In the “JWST vs. QED v.1” drawing, the wiggly line represents the photon moving to the right, forward in space, after being emitted from an electron. The photon is also moving down in this diagram, indicating that it can travel back in time. Effectively, the photon is absorbed by one electron before it was emitted from the other electron, seemingly violating laws of physics, and running time backwards. This is a difficult aspect of quantum physics that uses retro-causality and quantum entanglement to explain the phenomenon.
The JWST can also be seen as a times-machine of sorts; the more distant the objects it images, the further back in time it sees. This is possible because the light emitted by distant objects takes time to reach our eyes. So, what we see has already happened sometime in the past.
The challenge I set for this artwork was to explore the notion that space and time are effectively interchangeable and are facets of the same thing, depending on one’s relative point of view. The work juxtaposes a rendering of the JWST, with its large light reflecting mirror (and its ability to see back in time), with a diagram describing quantum particles and the fluidity of time and our perception of light — the large and the small, the classic and the quantum, and the mutability of time.
In 2017, as part of NASA’s public outreach, Makepeace was invited, along with several other artists, to create art inspired by the Webb telescope while it was still under construction at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Launched on Christmas Day, 2021, the telescope is now traveling through space, one million miles from Earth, on a mission to gather information about the farthest reaches of the visible universe.
