Beholding the Big Bang

Beholding the Big Bang is a sculpture in which a motor drives a series of gears which reduce the motor speed such that the final gear will take 13.82 billion years to rotate once. This is one of the estimates for the age of the Universe since the Big Bang. The final gear will, in practice, never turn, so it is firmly embedded in a block of concrete! This presses the point visually. The motor is present time with all that is going on. The concrete is stillness—perhaps the imaginary moment before everything happened.