In a post-apocalyptic hallway, whose ceiling is traversed by a thick metal tube, a plaque reminds us that the internet was invented here. After a year of working separately, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau met in one of these offices in 1991 to lead the project that led to the World Wide Web. So the 20th century, which was born in the Switzerland of Albert Einstein and James Joyce, died in the same country, thanks to that miracle of international cooperation called CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research or European Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics). ).
On one of the doors in this corridor of the Alien ship there is a sign for Los Alamos National Laboratory. It can be said that CERN is the antithesis of the Manhattan Project. After the Second World War, in the same Europe as the Nuremberg Tribunal, this extraterritorial project began to take shape, which has promoted our knowledge of what, for lack of a better name, we call reality like no other.
Although we are geographically in Switzerland, a stone’s throw from the border with France, CERN is not governed by either country. The organization is made up of twenty-one member states that share financing and decision-making, and work with twenty-eight other nations, which make contributions of all kinds: money, talent, materials, equipment, scientific diplomacy.
We are talking, therefore, about a community with peaks of up to 15,000 people, plus their families, of about fifty nationalities. The majority are relatively young, since it is a place where many careers begin, but only twenty percent of them are consolidated, those of an elite of brilliant, extraordinary scientists. It is not strange for me to talk, in a single day, with seven people from seven different countries. His Esperanto is not so much English as physics. And contemporary art has become a very effective interface for the rest of the world to access that fascinating conversation.
Arts at CERN
Helga Timko is a musician and loves to write. In addition, she is an accelerator physicist, an expert in designing high-intensity operational scenarios. She is part of the cultural advisory board of Arts at CERN, the department that since 2011 has promoted dialogue between artists and scientists within the largest physics laboratory in the world. Together with other researchers (such as Frédérick Bordry) and cultural managers (such as Elvira Dyangani Ose or Vicente Todolí), he is in charge of selecting the artists who will receive a scholarship to spend three months inside this labyrinth of offices, corridors and printing machines. cafe, auditoriums, gardens with giant disused artifacts, laboratories and ATMs. And to guide them, once they arrive here, not only physically (there is even an app, MapCERN, so as not to get lost in this Frankenstein of architectures), but also intellectually, in the field of the latest discoveries in theoretical and experimental physics.
“Physics has always seemed to me to be a discipline very close to philosophy,” he tells me with a soft voice and gestures, his hair very long, spilling over the table: “And I like talking to artists because they force me to rethink everything I know.” , because we see the same concepts in very different ways.” He remembers the day when Dutch artist Rosa Menkman (who calls herself an “expert on cyclops and rainbows,” a “resolution theorist,” and “future media archaeologist”) told him she was interested in resolutions, because it is a topic that has obsessed Timko since she was a child: “My science teacher told me that the atom could not be seen with the naked eye, because light destroys it, and that is what we dedicate ourselves to at CERN: building artifacts to see the tiny.” One here understands the breadth of the spectrum of scales that traverse our perception of the world.
“Our work is very similar to that of a detective,” comments the Argentine particle physicist Tamara Vázquez Schröder in the same meeting room, in some corner of the same labyrinth, with greater vocal emphasis: “When there is a failure in an accelerator, As in ATLAS, it is very difficult to locate the problem and repair it, but you also have that sensation of detective search on a daily basis, since you are constantly looking for signs of new physics, in all those collisions of particles that pass before your eyes ”.
Since the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012, everything has changed at CERN. It was then proven that the elementary particle that the British Peter Higgs theorized in the sixties really existed. Higgs bosons are now constantly seen. And the logic has been reversed: experimental physicists look for phenomena in the images extracted from the accelerators that theorists will have to explain in the future.
“In conversations with artists we feel the creative energy, theirs and ours,” says Timko. And Vázquez Schröder adds: “They are very similar to the dialogues that we, experimental physicists, have with theoretical physicists, when from time to time we meet, in the mountains, to share knowledge.” The world of the most precise machines in the world and the world of those who, in their offices, still think with the help of a whiteboard: there is something hypnotic about walking past all those open doors and seeing dozens of formulas and notes and abstract drawings drawn in chalk.
Science Gateway
On October 7, the new iconic CERN building was inaugurated: the Science Gateway by Renzo Piano, with permanent exhibitions and spaces dedicated to auditoriums and educational workshops. It was in 2017 when the director of the institution, Fabiola Gianotti, announced the construction of this double elevated tunnel to seal the commitment of the scientific community to pedagogy and the transmission of knowledge. Its multimedia installations, counterpointed with historical objects and interactive experiments, are always packed with students and tourist groups. It is an interpretation center for CERN, but also for the entire reality.
One of the permanent exhibitions has been curated by Arts at CERN and demonstrates its role as intermediary or translator between research and society. It is titled Exploring the Unknown. You can see works by four regular collaborators of the program: Julius von Bismarck, Chloé Delarue, Ryoji Ikeda and Yunchul Kim. They have in common the will to make the invisible visible: time and space, the quantum vacuum and dark matter. Through sculptural geometries or projected on screens. Perhaps the most ambitious attempt is that of Von Bismark, who with the kinetic sculpture Round About Four Dimensions, in collaboration with Benjamin Maus, shapes a hypercube or tesseract so that we can escape our three-dimensional imagination for a few seconds and glimpse no more no less than the fourth dimension. It is impressive to see that meccano move before our eyes, configuring a compact and organic figure, which we had already glimpsed, thanks to Christopher Nolan, in Interstellar. But if in the film that figure was remote and future, in the Science Gateway you see it close: pure today.
The library and the archive
At CERN there is a small bookstore where both popular works for amateur audiences and the most advanced volumes and manuals of contemporary physical sciences are sold. It is connected to a library of contemporary design and natural light, which contrasts with other architectural structures from the second half of the 20th century, such as the basement that houses the large archive.
Particle accelerators are colossal photographic machines. Currently on display at the Georges Pompidou center in Paris is the Capital Image project, by photography historian Estelle Blaschke and photographer Armin Linke, which studies the new dynamics of image production and reading. Both execution and reception have become non-human. So many photographs are generated that only algorithms can evaluate and classify them. The project has studied, among other devices and laboratories, those at CERN: the images of the LExan Bubble Chamber, which since 1981 has visualized countless subatomic particles.
For decades, these snapshots of elementary particles were reviewed manually: the files, reports and photographs are perfectly archived. In the same space – a spy movie basement – ??descriptions of all the experiments that have been carried out here over the last fifty years are also preserved. And the recordings of interviews with physicists who have worked at CERN, an oral memory that has three levels of security: some can be heard twenty years after their registration; others, at fifty; but there are also records that will never be heard.
While that moment arrives, or not, many artists have become interested in the only personal archive preserved here, that of Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel Prize winner in physics, patient of Carl Gustav Jung, interlocutor of Heisenberg, Oppenheimer and Einstein. I am excited to see letters, handwritten and typed, from the father of the theory of relativity. Here not only does cosmic radiation pass through you: so does the history of science, in the form of confessions, seals, calligraphy.
The digitization of images at the turn of the century made it possible to begin to automate their selection, according to the value of the recorded information. It has been done personally, or through mathematical algorithms, until artificial intelligence has begun to be used for screening. Lorenzo del Pianta Pérez – whose father is Florentine and whose mother is Valencian – after showing me the control room of the ATLAS experiment (one of the seven particle detectors of the Large Hadron Collider), tells me that he works precisely on the application of AI in these processes .
But theoretical physicists are concerned that “at the bottom of neural networks there is an inaccessible area, which we cannot understand” and “they distrust that we deposit in them precisely the selection of clues to decipher what we also do not understand.” May we try to illuminate a darkness with another darkness.
Jorge Carrión is a journalist and writer. His latest novel is ‘Membrana’ (Galaxia Gutenberg)