The bubble chamber sand mandala

One sprinkle of sand at a time, two artists recreated the moment a particle passed through a detector 30 years earlier. For 30 days, Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher spent about 12 hours per day sitting or kneeling atop a 20-by-14-foot platform at The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn. All day they gently scratched the sides of foot-long copper tubes, using the vibrations to coax grains of crushed, dyed marble onto a large blueprint. Slowly, they sculpted out a replica of a decades-old pho...