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After getting all excited for the Atheon, the Clog decided to check it out in person. (Woah, a follow-up review? Unthinkable!) Here are our thoughts in a word: disappointing.
To be honest, we’re not sure what we expected—some sort of (pseudo)scientific epiphany, maybe the answers to next week’s philosophy midterm, perhaps a better understanding of dark matter—but what we didn’t expect was the inability to see the actual display at 6:00 p.m.
Maybe it was the ephemeral fantasy we had of an illuminated, awesome Temple of Science (caps for Emphasis) to which all the masses would flock in celebration of a New Enlightenment, groveling at the knees of their Dark Lord Galileo, Bringer of Reason.
But that was just a fantasy. To illustrate our point, we commissioned an artist to give us his interpretation of the Atheon at night, painted at the same vantage point as the above photo:
Yep. If you squint hard enough, you can actually make out nothing. But even in the daytime, the stained glass—supposedly imprinted with NASA’s images of the cosmic microwave background radiation—is really hard to not mistake for a plant or a couch or a unicorn.
The musical piece, titled “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?” is likewise something of a disappointment. Not only is it very faint, but we just didn’t recognize the “hypothetical universes” in the very short piece—and trust us, we’ve heard many hypothetical universes. Oh boy have we heard them. Don’t you worry about that.
We have a suggestion for Mr. Keats, though he shouldn’t take it seriously (at all). Instead of discrete pieces of a visual representation of the cosmic microwave background radiation separated by feet of concrete, he should perhaps tile the Ancient of Days on a stained-glass representation, complete with O Fortuna blasting menacingly in the background:
Our trip to the Atheon wasn’t a complete disappointment, however. We managed to grab a laugh from a more urban art piece on the other side of the street:
We will remember you, little piece of sidewalk art. We will.
Image Sources: Evante Garza-Licudine; Destinys Agent under Creative Commons, edited by Evante Garza-Licudine
Earlier: ‘I Don’t Believe in God, I Believe in Science’
Tags:Ancient of Days, Atheon, Cliche-theon, Dark Lord Galileo the Bringer of Reason, Remember me!
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Comments:
Oct 9, 2008 at 10:57 pm
that black rectangle looks pretty nifty.
i mean. it’s not exactly a picture, yet it is a picture.
under the right light, and if your screen is shiny, if you look into the black rectangle you can see your own face. oooh…ah….
:( 
Oct 9, 2008 at 10:06 pm
YES! I saw that chalking the other day but was in too much of a hurry to take a picture. I am super excited to see that someone else did. Yay, clog!