CERN Energetically Probes the Arts Free

Giant spinning tops, table tennis, and antimatter on stage have all graced the halls of CERN recently as part of the lab’s stepped-up effort to combat the public’s declining interest in physics. “After the end of World War I, it was clear that physics was the main interesting area. There’s much clearer competition between the sciences these days,” says Hans Hoffmann, a CERN scientist who is involved in outreach activities. The lab’s public outreach is off to a flying start with a physics teaching conference and an art exhibition.

The culmination of months of outreach activities, this past November’s “Physics on Stage” conference for high-school physics teachers attracted 450 teachers from 22 European countries to CERN. The teachers exchanged teaching tools, bringing remote-controlled robots, a play on antimatter, a display of the physics of table tennis, and a demonstration of chaos theory using a water wheel. The conference also served as a forum for physics education issues: Discussion centered on the public perception that physics is too complicated and expensive, the decline of high-school enrollments in the sciences, and the shortage of physics teachers.

“When the economy is good, students don’t go into teaching, particularly physics teaching,” says Brenda Jennison, who trains physics teachers at the University of Cambridge. “Physics on Stage” was the first in an annual education series; this year 14- to 18-year-olds will be invited to the lab for a conference that looks at “Life in the Universe.”

And over the past year 10 artists have spent time at CERN collecting ideas for particle-physics-inspired computer animation, etching, painting, video, and sculpture. The “Signatures of the Invisible” exhibition—so named because of the signatures left by subatomic events—includes three large metal spinning tops, a “sculpture machine” consisting of thousands of needles attached to nylon threads, and a 23-centimeter-thick painting that portrays both the Large Electron–Positron accelerator’s doors and the nearby Jura mountains. The “Signatures” exhibition opens in London on 1 March and will appear in Europe, Japan, the US, and possibly Australia before closing in 2004.

The exhibition is about having people realize that there is intellectual value in things they don’t understand, says Maurice Jacob, a theoretical physicist at CERN and one of the project’s initiators. Says Grace Adam, project coordinator at the London Institute, the principal sponsor of the exhibition, “The art is not an explanation of the science; the artists feel this very strongly. It is two groups of people exchanging ideas.”

Does the collaboration help scientists in their own work? “In terms of describing nature, I don’t think it helps that much,” says CERN scientist Michael Doser, who is teaming up with “Signatures” sculptor Monica Sand to make particle collisions visible to the naked eye with light-emitting scintillators. “The real effect is a nimbleness of mind that gets developed by having your assumptions questioned.”