On the windy flanks of Mount Aragats, a biblical-sounding massif in Armenia, an old man — a cook — shuffles through a sprawling array of oddly shaped, empty buildings.

The place is a symbol of what Yulia Grigoryants, an Armenian photographer, calls Cosmic Solitude. Once upon a time, it was one of the bustling centers of physics, devoted to the study of cosmic rays: high-energy particles thrown from exploding stars, black holes and other astrophysical calamities thousands or millions of light-years away and whistling down from space.

Twentieth-century physics grew into a mathematical labyrinth as one weird subatomic particle after another was discovered and theory tried to keep up with experiment. Then physicists learned how to create these particles themselves, in giant particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Mountaintop aeries like the Aragats Cosmic Ray Research Station receded in the quest for ultimate knowledge.