The ghost and the particle
“Height: 1m68. Elongated face, large bright eyes, black hair, mat complexion. Iron gray overcoat, dark brown hat”
This is how the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana is described in the wanted notice published by the Italian police after his strange disappearance on the night of March 26, 1938, aboard a ship sailing between Palermo and Naples.
The 31 year-old man, who was considered as a true genius and whose work might have changed the course of history, had purely and simply vanished.
For the past eighty years, writers and historians have been captivated by the mystery surrounding his uncanny disappearance. Was it (a) suicide? Kidnapping? Murder? Escape?
What if the answer could be found in his own equations? Majorana prophetised the behavior of a particle, the neutrino, that resembled him : a ghost. As if, by disappearing, he had vowed his biography to liken his physical theories, and his very existence to remain bound to the fundamental uncertainties of modern physics.
From Rome to Naples and down to Palermo, this series of photographs unfolds as a mental journey, looking for a ghost.
By creating a pause in time, the photographs become palimpsests linking past and present times, matter and anti-matter, reality and abstraction.
This is how the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana is described in the wanted notice published by the Italian police after his strange disappearance on the night of March 26, 1938, aboard a ship sailing between Palermo and Naples.
The 31 year-old man, who was considered as a true genius and whose work might have changed the course of history, had purely and simply vanished.
For the past eighty years, writers and historians have been captivated by the mystery surrounding his uncanny disappearance. Was it (a) suicide? Kidnapping? Murder? Escape?
What if the answer could be found in his own equations? Majorana prophetised the behavior of a particle, the neutrino, that resembled him : a ghost. As if, by disappearing, he had vowed his biography to liken his physical theories, and his very existence to remain bound to the fundamental uncertainties of modern physics.
From Rome to Naples and down to Palermo, this series of photographs unfolds as a mental journey, looking for a ghost.
By creating a pause in time, the photographs become palimpsests linking past and present times, matter and anti-matter, reality and abstraction.
