The inspiration behind my piece, The Cave, is both Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave and the scientific discoveries of the 20th century. In this piece I aim to convey how despite all the progress we often think we have made in the pursuit of knowledge, modern science, and quantum theory especially, have shown us how, in many respects, we are still only looking at shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave.

This aspect of my message is symbolised in the two cavemen in this drawing who magnify each other. As a symbol, the magnifying glass is a reference to the Rutherford experiment of the 20th century. In this experiment, alpha particles were fired at a piece of gold foil. Given the accepted atomic model at the time-atoms to these scientists were thought to be little massive balls- it was expected that the alpha particles would be deflected by the foil. This was not the case, however. Rather, the majority of alpha particles went right through. The shocking conclusion reached by Rutherford and his colleagues in response to this was that atoms, in fact, consist mostly of empty space (I aim to symbolise this empty space by the lack of material behind the magnifying glass in my piece).

Rutherford’s conclusion absolutely defies our sense of perception and reality: if we were to magnify something with a powerful enough magnifying glass, would we see nothing? Thousands of years ago, in Ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato had warned humans not to put too much faith in our senses, for, according to the thinker, they could only reveal an imperfect shadow of objective reality. This was, in part, the message of his Allegory of the Cave. The cavemen in my piece symbolise this story and, together with the magnifying glass, the scenario symbolises the scientific pursuit of knowledge in the 20th century and how it has revealed an ancient philosophical truth about the nature of perception.

Moreover, I further emphasise the aforementioned Platonic message, in that the cavemen in my piece, are within another magnifying glass, on a larger bristol board covered in galaxies, which is meant to symbolically represent the unimaginable smallness of earth and humans in comparison with the rest of the universe. This also represents another sense-defying discovery in the 20th century: the vastness of the universe and the fact that even on this large scale there are areas of empty space.

In conclusion, these 20th century scientific discoveries are sense-defying and as such show how Plato’s philosophy is till relevant today and this is the message I aim to convey in my piece, The Cave.