The Order Of Things

  • Dates
    2019 - Ongoing
  • Author
  • Topics Portrait, Contemporary Issues, Documentary
  • Location Germany, Germany

Science produces a very precise image of reality, similar to the way photography is said to do. To find out what it looks like when scientists generate knowledge, I visited places of basic research with my camera.

"But from the earliest beginnings of their culture, people have can never bear to accept the unconnected and inexplicable coexistence of events. They always tried to understand the underlying order of the world. We still have an insatiable need to know why we are here and where we come from. Humanity's deep-rooted desire for knowledge is justification enough for our ongoing search. And we have no less goal in mind than a complete description of the universe in which we live." - A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking

Human life can be described as a series of different forms of search. This description is divided into small, individual and highly repetitive searches, and large, long-term and more general ones.

The narrative of the great quests was often represented by religion, but was increasingly replaced by science. These narratives have always determined the respective spirit of the times by providing a model for thinking about the existence of life and the nature of our world.

Science as such moves dynamically in the field of tension between knowledge and non-knowledge, in the expansion of its knowledge horizons:

In a gap where the boundaries are not fully defined and the results are not yet assured.

The conceptual photo-documentary series "The Order Of Things" deals with precisely this area of tension between understanding and not understanding. The interspace from which human understanding and self-understanding is expanded. It takes place in various disciplines of physics, biology, chemistry as well as archaeology, focusing on the terms "search" and "cognition".

In this work, the individual fields of research are to be understood together as the avant-garde, which in the sense of the title expands the boundaries of knowledge. The pictures should also be read less as answers, but rather bring the questioning closer to the viewer. What does it look like where one finds oneself between knowledge and assumption? What do we really know and how do we as a society deal with our knowledge and progress? What does cognition and search look like?

The portraits in this series were created – similar to a scientific experiment – in an always the same setup in the office of the respective scientist. The camera exposed at a fixed interval in a period of 1-2 hours, while I left the place to increase the degree of objectivity of my experiment.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Giant cave "Windhole" - For 35 million years the cave near Cologne was undiscovered and untouched by man. To date, a network with a total length of over 6,000 metres has been developed.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research - One of the vacuum chambers contains the flight replacement unit of the instrument COSIMA, which was built for the Rosetta mission. The identical sister unit orbits comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerassimenko. By analysing the composition of comets, the Rosetta mission is expected to provide clues to the origin of our solar system.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Karl Schwarzschild Observatory - The formation of massive stars is much rarer than that of sunlike stars. These stars are particularly interesting because nuclear fusion produces the elements necessary for organic life.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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German Electron Synchrotron - Diffraction signal of the crystal lattice structure of magnetite in phase transition at -153 °C.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy - Distant celestial bodies, which seemingly have no proper motion due to their great distance, are observed radioastronomically and used as a basis for determining positions on the surface of the Earth. In this way, the earth and the movement of its tectonic plates can be measured.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research - A 3D print of the target comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko to determine the landing coordinates of the Rosetta lander.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics - GEO600 uses earth-based interferometry to measure the movement of free masses caused by gravitational waves.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Leibniz Institute for Primate Research - A behavioural experiment in which social and motor characteristics of a rhesus monkey are studied. Learning the game is the first part of neuroscience experiments.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Human Brain Project Research Centre Jülich - 3D-PLI measures the birefringence of myelinated nerve fibers of the human brain using polarization microscopy. This allows contrasts of individual nerve fibres and their tracts to be generated and their spatial course to be determined.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics - Gravitational wave astronomy expands our understanding of the universe and closes a gap in the scientific chain of proof, which Albert Einstein pointed out in 1915 in his General Theory of Relativity.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Institute for Human History - The Department of Archaeogenetics is specialized in the collection of genetic data sets for the reconstruction of human population structures. Based on these reconstructions, historical hypotheses are examined.

© Volker Crone - Giant cave "Windhole" -Reef limestone is formed from accumulations of fixed marine organisms.
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Giant cave "Windhole" - Reef limestone is formed from accumulations of fixed marine organisms.

© Volker Crone - German Electron Synchrotron -A sample of the mineral magnetite for experiments with ultra-short X-ray laser pulses.
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German Electron Synchrotron - A sample of the mineral magnetite for experiments with ultra-short X-ray laser pulses.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research - In cryo-rooms, drill cores from glaciers and ice layers from the Arctic and Antarctic are prepared in order to measure and test their physical properties.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Human Brain Project - Research Centre Jülich - Imaging techniques such as photon fluorescence microscopy, imaging mass spectrometry, and X-ray scattering are expected to provide a complete three-dimensional, digital model of the fiber-optic architecture of the human brain. To be able to use these imaging techniques and build a digital brain, a real brain must first be dissected.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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German Electron Synchrotron - The free-electron laser is used to study the ultrafast dynamics of the so-called Verwey phase transition.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research - The first non-destructive method for determining geochemical data is based on photographic technology. The colour and thickness of the sediment layers allow us to make assumptions about the composition of the oceans of past times.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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German Electron Synchrotron - X-ray laser flashes make it possible to follow the movement of atoms and molecules. A free-electron laser accelerates electrons to almost the speed of light, allowing chemical reactions to be "filmed", for example.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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German Electron Synchrotron - At DESY, scientists* can apply for measurement times to conduct experiments at the free-electron laser.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Archaeological excavation near Pömmelte - Built at the end of the third millennium B.C., the ring shrine of Pömmelte shows similarities to Stonehenge in its orientation and dimensions. The scientists* involved in the archaeological excavation of this monument are collecting data to erase blind spots in human history.

© Volker Crone - Image from the The Order Of Things photography project
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Archaeological excavation near Pömmelte - Built at the end of the third millennium B.C., the ring shrine of Pömmelte shows similarities to Stonehenge in its orientation and dimensions. The scientists* involved in the archaeological excavation of this monument are collecting data to erase blind spots in human history.

© Volker Crone - Karl Schwarzschild Observatory - Astronomical Library
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Karl Schwarzschild Observatory - Astronomical Library

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