I Was sceptical when I heard what Josiah McElheny was proposing. It was over lunch in September 2004 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and he was talking about the first time he saw the famous Lobmeyr chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. As an artist working mainly in glass, he had been inspired to use them as the basis for a sculpture of the big bang. I was there by invitation, an astronomer hoping for a meaningful collaboration between science and art.rnThe Met's chandeliers, a striking stylistic hybrid of 19th-century opulence and Sputnik-era modernism, were designed in 1965 -coincidentally the year that the discovery of the cosmic microwave background provided the crucial evidence needed to back up big bang theory. Josiah's idea was to remake one of the chandeliers into an eye-level sculpture of streamlined, modernist style and, at the same time, convert it to a scientifically accurate model with glass pieces representing galaxies and lamps representing quasars.
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