Restriction: Quantity over quality. Work with a lot of something.
Rearranging kosher salt crystals in the shape of a diagram from Quantum Electrodynamics, which I just finished reading. Good nerdy times. The (photon) bit is supposed to read “(photon from magnet)” but my patience ran thin after about an hour and a half of shuffling salt around.
Some close shots reveal the microscopic pain at work.
The most ironic thing was how I ended up moving them around. Initially, I was going to use a fine-tipped pen point to poke them around surgically. It turns out that it’s very easy to work up static charge on a pen’s point when you rub it on glass, so then the grains would statically stick to the point of the pen and mess everything up. Hilarious that I had to use a blunt instrument to move the pieces of the diagram about electrons and photons because of the electrons moving into the pen too much. Static quantum uncertainty principle.