BeautyQuark

LUMINOUS

2011-08-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

Although this has very little in some senses to do with particle physics, it has at its heart a fascination with light and the creative collisions which happen when two artistic forces meet to make work together.

Written in 2010, a year after I had the privilege of working with both both Fernanda and Victor in helping them find the lighthouses they sought around the English coast, and having deep talks in extraordinary places, this text is being published this year in a book celebrating the great Brazillian British Council initiative ArtistsLinks, coordinated by the amazing Roberta Mafhuz.

THE LIGHT SEEKER/KEEPERS

This is the tale of two artists. And two lovers, too. One is a film maker from Uruguay who looks as if he carelessly shrugs on his clothes, stepping straight out of a Jean Luc Goddard movie, with watchful eyes and a crown of hair laced with silver. The other is an artist, who appears as tall as the sky, treading the earth with the care of a mermaid, a waterfall of golden corkscrew hair tumbling down her back. He is called Victor Lema Rique. She, Fernanda Chieco.

Both are other-worldly, somehow fittingly so, lured to England from South America by a love of Virginia Woolf and her modernist stream of consciousness novel 'To the Lighthouse', published in 1927. The artist-lovers sit, in-be-tween worlds and moments, one deepening Autumn evening in 2008 at the start of their journey, in St James's Park in London, under trees whose leaves are singed with scarlet and orange. They talk of how the beam of Virgina Woolf's prose has caught them in its glare and never let them go. That's why they are in England for five months - to go to not just one lighthouse, but to many - however impossible or dangerous they may turn out to be. To enable them do this, they have an accomplice, they tell me. And a strange one she turns out to be. Or so their story goes.

Carolina is a young student in Sao Paulo, they say, who has a passion for gardening and anything to do with the sea. She knows everything there is to know about ships and tides, fish and coastal maps. One day, out of the blue, she sees a light coming out of a drawing of a lighthouse that is hanging on her wall. She feels compelled to find the light and follow its sweeping arc wherever it leads her. Or so they say. And so her quest begins, bringing Fernanda and Victor in her slipstream to these English shores. But the truth is stranger still - because in fact she does not exist. She is just a metaphor for Fernanda and Victor's first artistic collaboration together: both its reason and its subject. Without her, they wouldn't exist as a couple working on a shared artistic enterprise:

"Us working together “only exists” because of her so we’ll only get rid of her (or she’ll get rid of us) when we have decided the work is finished. Differently from many other artists’ partnerships, in our case, the subject itself ended up establishing the identity of our collaboration."

This is how they explain the presence of this stranger in their midst, Carolina, who is also referenced in decades of popular culture, like in the 1970s horror movie Poltergeist. 'Carol Anne - Don't Go into the Light!' is the epic cry at a turning point in the film. Or the same words turn up again in 2006 in that bricolage-showcase of popular culture, the american cartoon, South Park. Or again in the 1980s in Brazil, when Carolina was one of the most popular names of the day. The truth is Carolina has existed long before Fernanda and Victor: she is a thread across time. And so with this timely timeless companion, Fernanda and Victor start beating their way to 12 lighthouses during October and November in 2008, along the leggy rugged coast of southwest of England. They discover lighthouses with names like Trinity and St Just, Tatar Du and Godrevy. Some can be only reached by sea. Others are perched precariously on cliff edges. Another one is found, unexpectedly, inland, stranded like an upturned whale hanging by its tail. Fernanda and Victor document everything, like the British adventurer William Dampier who is another source of inspiration for their project and who had even landed on the shores of Brazil:

"William Dampier was our inspiration to the explorer’s aspect of Carolina: the way he investigated the world throughout his trips around the world as well as his drawing/writing documentations. For her, he is a sort of Google from the 17th century. In his diaries, he performed cut and paste of information, using his buccaneer’s skills, to recreate the world filtered by his own eyes. During his time, in some ways he lit up and fired people’s imaginations regarding the unreachable, and hardly known lands. "

Thus following in William Dampier's transverse-reverse-converse footsteps across time and place, Fernanda and Victor film, photograph, film, write, draw, sketch their way to and from all the lighthouses, recording every detail right down to the GPS coordinates. But where will their journeys lead after they have been finished? And how will two such distinct artists work together as artists, never mind as lovers? Carolina is like a protective shield with whom they guard themselves against what may happen. A talisman, or a charm, some would say. Or an angel. A charming angel of a metaphor, who unites them.

Yet at first glance Fernanda's and Victor's artistic work is worlds apart. It is difficult to second guess how Carolina is going to work her magic between them. Fernanda's work is intense and illustrative, with fine lines, a detailed intimacy and a raw sexuality. Her drawings are like the surrealist Leonora Fini's - exquisite in their illustrative detail and powered by imaginative scenarios, full-frontal in their celebration of the naked body, drawn with flowing delicate lines. Mushrooms impossibly bloom from a woman's vulva or between her breasts. Men and women copulate copiously and riotously in illustrative detail across the bareness of white paper, sometimes connected by the throat by a line pumping of blood. Fernanda describes her work as being 'like a medical textbook, a folio of classical drawings and the physical laboratory of a lunatic inventor.' Her work is represented by the celebrated Gallery Leme in Sao Paulo.

In contrast, Victor is an established video artist who works in film and has shown at international video art festivals. He started his career as a painter, but then moved into multi-media, investigating the worlds of architecture, literature and human experience in drawings, videos, performances, short films, radio soap operas and published texts. His work is highly literary and ideas driven- engaging with the world of philosophy, psychoanalysis and theory. Kant and Foucault litter the texts often accompanying his work which can be described as questioning, exploring and opening up psychological scenarios. It's engrossing to think how these two artists will work together - and what will happen both personally and artistically.

In the first days in the artists studio at Spike Island In Bristol, when the artistic journey on paper is about to begin and the physical journey has stopped, Fernanda sends out an initial outline of how they will work together. It is a togetherness which is initially a-part of the whole enterprise:

'We will dismember our trip on 12 parts, which are directly related to each lighthouse we have been to. As for each part we will develop a story, which will be represented in different medias, based on our true experience added to fictional elements. We have decided work apart for a few days, each of us developing stories/sketches/ideas based on each lighthouse we have been to. Having done that, we put our material together and then we create a third material, which our body of works will be based on.'

Ironically the book which has inspired 'Carolina Don't Go Into the Light,' To The Lighthouse', is one which can be read as a manifesto on the necessity of the individual artist being alone in order to make art. The text shows Virginia Woolf's belief in the solipsism being the necessary condition for creativity. And so it is, in her novel, that Lily Briscoe stands apart from the Ramsay family, cut off from them, as they play on the metaphoric rocks and go about family holiday on the Isle of Skye in Scotland whilst she paints. Lily can only do this by never emotionally connecting or becoming part of the family, standing in between the polar and gendered opposites of the philosophical and coldly rational Mr Ramsay and the emotional and poetical Mrs Ramsay. In the meantime, the light in Virginia Woolf's story and prose oscillates between the three of them: the male, the female and the figure of Lily who unites both male and female principles and cuts an androgynous figure. Perhaps Carolina is Fernanda's and Victor's Lily - the lone creative questor, uniting opposites of every kind.

Like Virginia Wool's novel, too, Fernanda and Victor's work is an inquiry into the belief in the power of the individual to create art, which is an abiding driver of European and American modernism in the 20th century. This idea of the individual artist dates back to the Enlightenment and the philosophy of the primacy of self. In the 21st century however, this notion of the individual as artist is being dismantled and cracked apart by the open source creativity inspired by the web and the internet. In the 21st century digital age, time and space are no longer borders, but instead are superhighways to travel on. We can contact anyone at any time and any where. And there is more to it than even that. Web culture blends individual creativity with openness and lack of ownership, suggesting that an artist is the curator of an idea, not its sole owner and originator: any idea can be open to everyone and shared with others who are free to join in. Creativity is not something you keep to yourself.

This is where Fernanda and Victor's work is located, here and now, but even more dangerously and precariously so, by aligning the personal with the artistic relationship too. It is a collaboration which has the potential to put everything on the line for these two distinct and very different artists - not just the work itself. The artistic process will make or break it all, but they are optimistic and have faith in this together apart-ness:

Fernanda:

I think that in some parts of our collaborative process there is a discrepancy. However, we're using our divergences as tools for making the works. Like the way we put our ideas individually, and then we gather them to create something out of it. It's a bit like an alchemic process of putting two elements together in order to get a third one.

Victor:

I think there is a point of distance in our work, but at the same time there is a counterpoint, too. I observe a particular and clear distance in the physical compositions , techniques, traces, etc. but in other way there is a great connection when we look at our processes of creation before the execution of our individual work.

They come together to share ideas and directions for their painting and their stories. That is where their artistic process meets - in the conceptual discussion which happens between them, and their response and readings of their adventures to the lighthouses and to the people and the places they encounter. But the openness to creativity being achieved outside the self does not stop just with them as a couple . Other collaborators are invited to take part in the artistic process too, with Fernanda and Victor sending out a call to artists and writers to join Carolina. One man is filmed telling the story of a friend who went into the light and possibly committed suicide. The appeal he makes on film, is at the same time one for his disappeared friend to get in touch as well as a warning to Carolina. Another woman rushes from her home, at the dead of night, hurtling out into the street with her apron still on. She begs Carolina not to go to the light. No-one sees Carolina's purpose as anything but dangerous. How will she survive? A musician from Finland composes some music inspired by the story.

But the togetherness does have an apart-ness. At least at first. At the beginning of the Spike Island residency, when Fernanda and Victor are starting on the pictures, they work truly apart and separately at opposite ends of the studio. Victor draws in charcoal fantastical towers which are at once the lighthouses, but also at the same time are something completely different. Some are like futurist skyscrapers, others like brutalist architectural drawings or ziggurats from ancient times. All stand as iconic and ready for a game as giant chess pieces. He also leaves or creates great white spaces - hollows sometimes, at other times platforms on top of a structure or stretched out like an apron in front. It's to these places that Fernanda then comes to work, bringing her delicacy of line and a different intensity, as naked figures squirm, wriggle, squat, kneel and stand in a kama sutra of postures and positions.

"This is Tater Du lighthouse. It's the one which took us ages to find - two goes in fact because the GPS coordinates were wrong."

Fernanda says this, standing in front of a huge swathe of paper which runs half the length of one studio wall. A stubby lighthouse stands in the left hand corner, and in front, on a platform of activity, naked faceless and face-obscured women squirm, wriggle, kneel in an array postures and positions. What links them is that their hair is profuse, curling like snakes, sometimes covering their faces, sometimes binding their wrists or legs together, at other times clothing their whole bodies so they are one walking-length of hair. The picture is profoundly uncanny and surreal - suggesting both male and female surrealists like Max Ernst and Meret Oppenheim. The women are bound and gagged by invisible tides of wind, thrown into postures of abjection, suggesting a sexual enslavement and abject rapture too.

On the second attempt to get to Tater Du, Fernanda and Victor noted in their diary and script of their excursion, that the gates were locked, and more besides:

"There are three signs hanging, which say:

1st sign-

TATER DU HAIR SALON

Let the winds comb your hair

Open daily from 10am - 10pm

2nd sign-

CLOSED

3rd sign-

ACCESS FORBIDDEN"

"That's why the women's hair is all over this picture" Fernanda says. "The place is a hair salon, where the wind is a hair stylist, who combs and styles your hair in so many different ways."

Opposite the Tater Du picture, another picture runs the whole length of the other wall. Two lighthouses, one which isn't so dissimilar from the Empire State Building, the other like a Le Corbusier tower, stand on opposing shores, their beams intersecting in the middle of a turbulent chiacurso sea. In the crossbeam, stands a giant pig, with perky pickled eyes and a wrinkled snout, standing in the midst of a pool of potatoes. Every bristle on his body is picked out - even the piggy-pinkness of his skin in fine detail - in contrast to the great monolithic black and white representations of Lizard and St Ann's lighthouse, drawn by Victor.

"Do you know that when there was once a shipwreck off one of the coasts, that the only survivor which was found was a pig floating amongst a tide of potatoes?" Fernanda is smiling as she tells tales. "And do you know, that where the pig was found are the great rocks known as the Manacles? Thousands of years across, this was in fact a giant natural statue of a pig in the middle of the sea, just like the Colossus of Rhodes. The Manacles is but a fragment of what used to be there, and there are plans to reinstate it with a giant pig hologram."

Telling tales is an essential part of the couple's art work - picking up from Virginia Woolf and the narratives we weave out of existence. Fernanda is writing stories which tell of the couples' journeys and encounters to the lighthouses - but do they tell the truth? And when exactly were they written too? Before or after the event - or even after the picture have been made? She tells another tale this time, about St Johns, lighthouse which turns light into music. The tower is not a lighthouse in a conventional sense: it doesn't house a beacon or one of those huge oscillating mirrors. But instead, apparently, St John's is a conduit for all the light in the world, which then gets sucked down its tower to be stored underground in a chamber where it is transformed into sound. It then emanates as strange music from the scores of foxholes which stud the landscape around St Johns - much to the locals' surprise and wonderment. A composer Fernanda and Victor met on their travels has even made music inspired by this.

And of course this tale is reflected in the large picture on another wall: a stubby squat building, shrouded in darkness, below which and underground is a pyramid-shaped chamber bathed in light, in which naked women clap and chant. These pictures with their accompanying myths are pure fabrication - in the best senses of the word. They are made with the artistic tools which Victor and Fernanda have at their disposal to release their imaginations: words, pen, charcoal, music, video and their experiences to the lighthouse itself. It is difficult to know where the lines between fact and fiction begin and end - the unsettling experience of reading modernist fiction which Virginia Woolf deliberately played with, when she mixed her memories of her mother and father, with fiction in To the Lighthouse.

Fernanda is adamant that the tales they are telling in their work and in words can not be told in her mother tongue of Portuguese:

"I have thought and dreamt about these ideas in English. So the stories are written in English because it is through another language that I discover new ways of seeing, finding the lighthouses and telling tales. They are stories and experiences which just could not be told in Portuguese. They would be something completely different"

And five months later, as the artistic project is coming to an end in the UK, the way Fernanda and Victor have worked together has changed. Whereas at the beginning they worked at separate ends of the Spike Island studio, they now can work on literally the same paper, side by side, even if Fernanda describes Victor's work as messy, whereas her's is neat and particular. But the practice remains the same: Victor makes the first marks on the paper, making the setting and frame for the whole work. Fernanda brings the colour, making the connections between inside and outside worlds and the stories they are both telling.

They also reveal in their last few days in the studio, that the drawings in a sense start writing stories before they have finished them. Hence the blurring and the sense of giddiness when Fernanda spins yet another web of words in the freedom of a foreign language.

Then Victor and Fernanda throw open the doors and hold an open studio on the day before they leave. People drift in and feel compelled to stay when they hear the stories and glance at the huge pictures which line the walls with their surreal intensity. A psychoanalyst breaks into the silence with a candour which in England is shattering. "You have to be lovers. Only lovers could have made these works."

And so Carolina - and by default, Fernanda and Victor come into the light - though the work has yet to be finished. The light is now being carried back to Brazil to be completed and pursued still further on different shores, in different light.

Light is said to have three primary characteristics - intensity, frequency/wavelength and polarization. All these oscillate and change, but the three physical ingredients of light always remain the same. The artistic process of 'Carolina Don't Go Into the Light,' reflects the very subject Fernanda and Victor are trying to capture - the properties of light. Like 'To the Lighthouse', the work oscillates in its intensity, timing and movement between the opposites it investigates. Fernanda and Victor are light seekers who have become in their personal and artistic journey, light keepers too, bringing it home to Sao Paulo. Carolina goes into the light - and is coming out the other side. But in what final form is yet to be seen as the work continues In Brazil. 'Carole Anne don't go into the light' might have been the cry in a 1970s horror movie called 'Poltergeist'. But in this particular case, the horror would have been never to have gone there in the first place. And never to have even dared.

QUANTA, QUANTA - GILBERTO GIL AND THE ART OF PHYSICS

2011-07-10T00:45:00.000-07:00

Nobody does it like Gilberto Gil. Nobody. A one man powerhouse of ideas, music and insight, Gilberto was one of the front men of the late 1960s revolutionary Tropicalia movement which brought foreign influences and the voicing of social conscience directly into Brazillian music.

With the poet Torquato Mento, Gil wrote what became the hymn of the Torpical movement - Geleir Geral:
A poet unfurls the flag
 And the tropical morn begins to beat  
Resplendent, cascading, gracious
 A joyous sunflower heat  
In the general jam of Brazil
 That the Jornal do Brasil will greet

With Tropicalia, Gil became a global superstar and then shocked everyone by becoming Brazil's Minister of Culture in 2003, exciting another cultural revolution for the 21st century, this time in cultural policy. Pontos de Cultura focuses on the dispossessed and disenfranchised, creating a network of belonging and social change through the arts, supported by the Brazilian Government. But what has this got to do with physics? At first glance not alot.

Quanta, Gil's 32nd album released in 1997, shows as ever Gilberto Gil's focus on living and creativity. It is a heady blend of sambas, country, rock, forros, funk, ballads and boss nova rhythms and won the Grammy for World Music. But that's what one expects from Gil. What makes it so unusual is that it is an albulm all about art and science - as one of its samba tracks, 'Cinenci e Arte, makes explicit.

The lyrics of the title track say it all: "I know that art is the sister of science, both daughters of a fleeting God who makes and in the same moment unmakes. This vague God behind the world, from behind the behind." The albulm's quest for meaning through its elaborate series of short song cycles is thus set.

Another song, 'Pela Internet' (For the Internet) is a buoyant starry eyed ode to the information super highway, describing the evolution of communications.
However, Gil's image in this song isn't the internet as a superhighway, but instead as an "infosea," where the port of call receives not slave ships and merchandise, but diskettes and far flung missives. "I want to enter the net," sings Gil, "to contact the homes in Nepal, the bars in Gabon, that the carioca chief of police warns on his mobile."

It is this infinite web of possibilities and social connection which the internet offers, which was to become nearly 20 years after he wrote this song, the heart of Gilberto Gil's radical Pontos de Cultura policy.

The song is doubly ironic too. In form and style, Gilberto Gil draws comparison with what is considered to be the first samba ever recorded in Brazillian music, 'Pelo Telefone'. The last verses in Gil's song are an update of the original lyrics - bringing it up to date for the internet world, and the finale is a parody o Rolling Stones 'I Cant Get No Satisfaction' with playful vocal adlibs echoing Mick Jagger's endless quest for satisfaction with the line, sneered in English during the fade, "Got no connection!"

There are many shout outs throughout the albulm - embracing language from quantum mechanics, crab vendors and the goddess Shiva. But the ghost in this musical machine is undoubtedly physics. The albulm is in all but name dedicated to Brazil's most distinguished and honoured physicist, Cesar Lattes. Lattes was one of the discoverers of the pion - a subatomic partcile made of a quark and an antiquark and studied cosmic rays for all of his life. He came close to winning the Nobel prize twice, but never did.

The albulm contains an open letter from Lattes to Gil, in which he analyses the lyrics and the songs, observing

I ask only that you let me tell you of the happiness that your words about physics give me, but in some cases there is poetic license:

The "infinitesimal" is a mathematical fiction. Quantum is the minimum action (energy x time).

This theme of minimalism is reflected in the albulm on many levels. None of the twenty songs runs over four-and-a-half minutes, but together they amount to what has been called 'a sprawling, hungry embrace of everything from Gil's African roots, to God and the cosmos, to personal reflections, to the wowing possibilities of the Internet.'

Lattes ends his letter movingly with these observations directly to the great musician:

"Science and Art": moved and appreciate the attention.
Science inseminates subliminally.
Science is a younger sister (perhaps illegitimate)
Art: Camões asked for help from the ingenuity and art - not science.
Solomon says that "science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul" - the art, no. I will stop here, because Solomon also says: "Seek not to be too tight nor too wise: you want to ruin it?"

To conclude I quote a great architect, "When science is silent, art speaks" (Artigas).

With a hug,
Cesar Lattes

In the end, Quanta quanta is all about transformations - not only of the science and arts kind, but also of the society. The particle turned samba. A universe of possibilities in a quantum world. Quanta quanta

ANTI-MATTER: MIND OVER MATTER

2011-07-06T13:49:00.000-07:00

He says
It's all about
Mind over matter
Those moments on the trapeze
When a hand reaches out
Hand over heart
Over hand
Hand over
Heart.
You have to trust
That you will not fail

For 16 precious minutes in May, anti-matter was trapped at CERN for thelongest time on the planet. Held fast. Trap tight. In a vacuum. Like no place on earth, on earth. For a length of time not seen since the birth of the universe. It is arguably one of the most significant cultural moments on the planet - even aside from discovering the Higgs Boson.

The hand
that minds
the heart
that hands
the mind
the heart's
hand
Matters

And why? Because even though anti-matter does not exist today on earth, except when it is manmade like at CERN, without anti-matter we would not exist. There would be no beginnings - and indeed fewer endings. So capturing the disappeared is a moment of affirming exitsence. But somehow - and this is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science - at the beginning of the universe, matter and anti matter co-existed in equal amounts. And yet when the Big Bang threw them headlong into each other's arms, matter won over anti-matter - hence the world we live in, naturally is made of matter. The LhCB experiment at CERN is determined to find out why this is.

She says
It's all about
Matter over mind
Those moments on the trapeze
when a hand reaches out
Heart over
Hand over
Heart.

Essentially anti-matter is matter's time twin. A lone twin. A non twin-twin even. Because anti matter is essentially the same as matter except for one important fact - the electric charge on matter and anti-matter for some reason differs. This distinction leads to annihilation - because if anti matter comes in contact with matter, it will destroy itself.

Michael Doser, one of the physicists working on the Alpha experiment which achieved the historic trapping of anti-matter, believes that the arts have a role in helping us explain and understand anti-matter - taking us beyond the equations and formulas and experiments of particle physicists like himself:

"Much of science is mathematical. It is hard to go from maths which you know is correct to an intuitive understanding. For this, you have to go to an analogy which is flawed and never perfect. However until you can bring an equation into a visual analogue it is very hard to think about it fully. Once you find an analogue, then you can develop a much better understanding, and from this develop predictions which go beyond your understanding defined by the equations themselves. That is what art does for science"

You have to trust
that you will not fail

The mind
that hands
the heart
that minds
the heart's
hand

That's all that matters
No matter

But in essence, the arts have always been investigating the lone twin. The ying and yang of existence. The arts are predicated on absence - the absence of the thing itself, the idea, the feeling, person or an object. The arts stand in for what is not there or present at a particular moment in time. From the caves of Lascaux to the work of Rachel Whiteread, the arts have all been about non existence at the heart of existence. The arts are the negative charge.

Some arts explicitly engage with this idea of absence. Like Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (One Hundred Spaces 1995). She cast the spaces undet the chair, rendering the chair itself invisible and the invisible space beneath it visible, turning it in turn into a structure which could potentially be sat on or ate at.

Negative space has been the dominant form of Rachel Whiteread's work- turning negative space or emptiness into presence on a huge scale - like that of a house.
It is done to symbolise memory - that other great activity of the mind making present through mental thought what is no longer there.

But flip back in time, and those pictures of the horses, the man with the spear, and you have since earliest days of mankind, records of mankind now absence. Like those early examples of cunnieform - always standing in, always standing for what has been, making the non present, present. It is the art of knowing.

So in many ways, the arts can be seen as the anti-matter of science. Without it, science would not exist. Let alone the science of anti matter itself. The negative charge of the absent. The positive charge of the arts.

THE MATHEMATICS OF CROWD SOURCING

2011-04-20T08:45:00.000-07:00

The seeds for the forest were sewn playing chess. When he was 8 year s old, Andreas came face to face with the great Chess Grandmaster Kasparov. Pawn in hand, he made the first move. But Andreas was not alone. With him were 5 other 8 year old german chess players too, all as eager as he to make the opening gambit. And so it was, that a team of 6 8 year olds beat the great grandmaster of the game – proving that six heads are definitely much better than one – even the biggest and best one.

“People say that there are no scientists like Einstein today. But I say that doesn't matter. Much better to have a crowd of scientists not as good as Einstein, than to have one Einstein. My experience with Kasparov showed this.”

So says the now 48 year old Andreas, who is one of the leaders in the field of probability at CERN. And when he starts talking, you realize that the public and social trend for crowd sourcing in fact has a truly mathematical as well as experiential basis for delivering results. That in fact it is maths which really has created and driven the crowd sourcing phenomenon of today. We are merely following the numbers.

“We have developed Boost Tree Decision Making. Basically, you plant a decision and then go down the decision tree, until you get to the leaf – the most probable and true answer,” says Andreas. It is truly as simple as that. Or so it sounds when an expert describes it so simply in words. The algorithms to get there are another matter.

But in fact Boost Decision Tree Making does not stop there. In fact it has been shown that you don't just plant one tree to get the right answers. You plant many trees, with short roots, leading to quicker multiple answers. It turns out that one tree does not a forest make because it doesn't give you the full complete picture or the true answer after all. This is because if you just plant a decision and follow the roots to get to the answers, they will only come from one source and one starting point. Thus they can only be a binary variant on the same tree, rather than creating a whole forest of trees, which gives you the whole landscape of a forest to look at and check the verity of your answers. At least that is how I understand it. It gives a whole new slant to that expression not seeing the wood for the trees.

This algorithmic path to truth also has social application and others too which are part of our daily lives.

“Take your iLife on your mac” says Andreas. “You put in your photograph and it will go through the internet looking for matches, following an algorithmic path. That’s boost tree decision trees at work.” It works like magic - and like magic, it is in the end, all about numbers.

But that is not all. The Boost Decision Trees method also has a military application too, becoming the tool for decisions about making air strikes and selecting targets – an altogether much less palatable application for what was conceived of as a tool to link not destroy humanity. The twin sides of technology – revealing itself in the forest of our psyche.

BOOST DECISION TREES

http://www.ehow.com/how_5130809_boost-decision-trees.html

OF STARS AND WHALES

2010-12-01T13:31:00.000-08:00

Whales sing at the same frequencies as stars... when you know that, you realise that the universe we live in is integrated and interconnected. It isn't a space of disconnections and dislocations, but instead it is one where we constantly discover and explore what it truly means to be part of a connected world. Social networks and media technology are mere mimicry of what already exists in the world. That's what the whale song reminds us. Let alone the giant neutrino telescopes on the sea bed which are now enabling us to eavesdrop on the sounds of the deep ocean.

Go to the LIDO (Listen to the Deep Ocean) site - http://listentothedeep.com - and the whole soundscape of the ocean is yours at home right now. The ocean is as close as your breath. The sound is next to the beat of your heart. There are charts which tell you what you are listening to at any one given moment, so you can identify what you eavesdrop on. Who knows, it could be one of the sperm whales in the mediterranean which the LIDO network of seafloor observatories were the first to discover were there.

This act of listening to the deep blue is an illicit pleasure. Somehow the sounds of the oceans are more radically mysterious to us in this visually dominated age saturated by underwater footage which has probed the mysteries of the big blue that it mainlines into our consciousness. It's like having a shot of adrenalin fuelled by imagination. And this is all thanks to those giant eyes - the neutrino telescopes - on the ocean beds around France, Italy and Greece which were made with the purpose of detecting the cosmic rays which fall from outer space, but which now have ironically become great ears as well. Keep your eyes and ears open.

It seems that particle physics is on a mission to replicate our sensory organs - making them bigger and better, in order to fully comprehend Nature in all its monumental grandeur. The detectors used in particle physics at CERN and Fermilab in the USA are nothing but giant eyes enabling us to see the invisible. Stare at them when they are unpeeled, and even then their resemblance to the iris of an eye is astounding. The cosmic ray neutrino telescopes are giant ears of the deep oceans. And so LIDO was born...through the accident of discovering that as well as detecting the cosmic rays falling down to earth from deep space above, they could also detect the sounds of deep space below.

But that's not all. The LIDO network is also a way of us monitoring the movement of the earth itself - earthquakes seismic shifts, tsuanamis - as well as bioacoustics and anthropogenic noise which are normally inaudible to the human ear. These telescopes are the ultimate guardians planted in the sea like in a Greek myth, monitoring sounds, movements and sights in the Mediterranean Sea and the adjacent Atlantic waters.

And so, we can keep watchful and earful guard on the planet we live on. Thanks to them, we have the ocean on our sitting room floor and encounter a whale as we read in the bath. Time and space - the great dimensions of our world - have been superseded by new technology so that nothing now is impossible - because our imaginations then can take us the ultimate distance. But the question is, will we ever run out of mystery? And if we do, what will our lives be without discovery? Could we live our lives without it? The eyes and ears have it.

THE EYES HAVE IT

2010-10-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

Go hunting for crocodiles, and you will find mirrors in their eyes. Take a flash light in the dead of night, a fair am amount of your own good eye sight, and a great deal of courage, and as you track them down in the Amazon basin, you will discover a 100 glowing lamps in the water and gliding on the river banks. These are the mirrors at the back of the retina of the Amazonian crocodile – a peculiar evolution for these slip-slide navigators of the dark – which scoop up the luminosity of your flash light and reflect it back to you: the hunter turned prey. Inverted sight.

Such is the beauty of talking to a particle physicist, that narratives unfold before you in the course of what may appear to be a simple conversation. It’s like always being in Alice in Wonderland. There is one door open, but suddenly you find yourself falling through one in the floor. Or shooting up to a skylight as if propelled by wings. This narrative had started, like they all do, with what seemed like a simple question. Why is Alan working with neurobiologists investigating colour ? The story would take us to crocodiles, via Pablo and Paloma Picasso, the Salke Institute, Woody Allen, CERN, Louis Khan, Brooklyn and back again – and all the time at the centre of the narrative was the wonder of the human eye. How it receives images about the world and helps us navigate the world replete with matter.

Alan is baffled. For most of his career he worked in physics, constructing the silicon detectors which can see the invisible - detect and track particles which make up the universe. He was bemused when he discovered by looking at biology, that in fact all he was doing was constructing what already existed in nature. It's what drives him continuously to make the link between physics and neurobiology - against the grain of funding and silo-orientated science.

'Look at the detectors, and they are nothing but giant eyes,' he says. It reminds me of my first blog entry when I said just that. But it is more than that. Unwittingly, when building the great hexagons, physicists and engineers were mimicing the shape of the rods in our eyes which let light in - and out - and enable us to see. They are hexagonal too, in order to make sure they let in the most amount of light possible.
The unwitting symmetry between man and Nature is startling. And Alain is now on the quest of understanding Nature so as to improve science and technology.

'Do you know that when we see something, we actually see it in our eyes as 22 different images? But then our brain reorientates these images and collates them, giving us just one.' I didnt. And as ever, I feel inspired to think about how the arts can engage with this observation, as well as wonder what happens when the brain just cant manage this consilience and if there are people who see more than one image when they look at the world. Or whether that is what artists really are - because somewhere their brain is resounding with the memory of the discarded other ways of looking. Perhaps imagination is the ghost of the eye.

'Did you know that Woody Allen always tells physics jokes?' Another thing I didnt know. How we got to this seemingly random conversation is through discovering that Alan, like my father, is a Brooklyn boy, and Woody Allen is too, of course. All 3 are contemporaries - good jewish boys - and Alan turns out to have tried to gatecrash a Woody Allen concert in Geneva by telling a Woody Allen joke to a film crew. It won him the right to free entry. So I look up some of these jokes which have worked such magic:

Saying you know how to get around the universe is like going around China Town without a map

Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought - particularly for people who cannot remember where they left things.  

"She caught his eye, became his mistress, but was also the only woman ever to leave him' Alan again, now telling the story of Francoise Gilot, who was the mistress of Picasso when only 21, but left him, then later fell in love with the vaccine pioneer Jonas Salke, who founded the famous science institution in america, the Salke Institute, built by the extraordinary Louis Khan, who in turn inspired by father. It turns out Francoise's daughter by Picasso, Paloma, is now the fundraiser for the institute...

And so the connections continue and spin into the swirl of afternoon coffee at CERN. Picasso by way of Allen by way of Brooklyn and amazonian crocodiles - a cartography of a random conversation which revolves around the beauty of the eye.

For a detailed article about Alan Litke's pioneering work, see
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000591

TAKE YOUR PARTNERS

2010-10-07T03:29:00.001-07:00

A dance piece, conversation, floor show, game show and a chance to meet big minds. That’s how MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ fellow and award-winning american choreographer, Liz Lerman bills her latest multi-media piece, ‘The Matter of Origins’. As the title playfully suggests, physics is the main partner for this new work, with dancers making equations with their bodies and pushing gravity to the limits.

But that’s not all. Physics also provides the intellectual framework on which the whole piece hangs. For one hour, in a fusion of dance and physics, dancers both old and young, spin, leap, fall, balance and re-balance through critical moments of atomic and sub-atomic history: Marie Curie and the discovery of radium, the Manhatten project, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Hubble telescope.

These historical moments also provide the stunning visuals for the scenery too – with the vast swathes of the New Mexico desert surrounding Los Alamos and a video tour of the LHC at CERN projected into the dance space. ‘The Matter of Origins’ is a fusion between the ideas of physics with the physical possibilities - and impossibilities - of dance. The normally reticent Washington Post critically acclaimed the world premiere at the University of Maryland, USA, this September as ‘a work of expansive range, emotional depth and singular beauty.’

The story of how this partnership between dance and physics happened was a total surprise, even to the choreographer. It began with a chance encounter between Liz Lerman, who has run her own dance company Dance Exchange since 1976, with Gordy Kane, a physicist at the University of Michigan and director of the Michigan Centre for Theoretical Physics. He knew that she was interested in science and the impact it has on the way people think about themselves, having seen her previous work ‘Ferocious Beauty: Genome’ which examined the nature of discovery and the implications of research into genetics.

He captivated her interest this time in physics, by telling her about the search for the origins of the universe at CERN, and the mysteries of dark matter. So she came with her company of dancers to CERN for a few weeks in 2007 and then in 2008 to explore making a piece, speaking to the scientists about their ideas, and even dancing in the LHC tunnels and work spaces. And so the beginning of ‘The Matter of Origins’ project was born, and in the process she started discovering many unusual and quirky facts of the history of physics, which appear insignificant but which also nevertheless find their way into her piece.

For example, the extraordinary story of Edith Warner who has hired by Robert Oppenheimer when he was director of Los Alamos to feed the physicists. She ran the Los Alamos tea house, serving her special chocolate cake to amongst others, a scientist she knew as Doctor Baker, but who was in fact Niels Bohr. The audience at the ‘Matter of Origins’ is literally invited to chew over this fact – and many others, including Warner’s secret chocolate cake recipe – because when the dance has finished in Act One, in Act Two they are all unexpectedly swept into a room full of tea, tables and chocolate cake and asked to sit down. At each table is a host – or provacateur as Liz calls them, who is more often than not a physicist – who invites the audience to discuss what they experienced watching the dance piece, as well as the big science and its relation to society and the uncertainty principle and future possibilities. It is an extraordinary and exceptional bravura move which Liz easily explains:

“Act one is in the European terms a multi-media piece, with a video artist and animator as well as the dancers and the science. It is a lot for an audience to take in. In my last science-dance piece, I noticed that the audience lingered and stayed to discuss the piece far more than normal. They didn’t want a post performance discussion: they wanted to be the discussion.

So my idea was to make this happen, giving individuals the change to re-experience what they had just witnessed and to deepen their experience even further.”

Thus, between tea and talk, dancers weave between the tables too, adding yet more dimensions to this piece, including discussions about the uncertainty principle, which Liz says, in many ways, is where every artist stands. ‘For an artist it is always a question of finding momentum and of poise whilst in uncertainty.’

For all the discussion about the uncertainty principle, Liz is also adamant about another aspect of the dance and physics partnership which shows how they share common ground. It isn’t just in the intellectual footwork:

“The arts are the place which can help people find the place where they intersect with science. Awe, imagination and the grit to be relentless to make something work – that’s what scientists and artists both do. What is fascinating in both cases, is the relationships scientists and artists have to making mistakes - how we puzzle over them, and the obsession and passion which ensures that we get it right in the end.”

But as Liz’s piece shows, we may be merely at the beginning. Act Two ends with the beginning of Act One. The end has become a new beginning. Or perhaps it is just the beginning is never ending.

Note: This piece is being published in the next edition of the CERN Courier in November
http://cerncourier.com/cws/latest/cern

CHASING STARS

2010-09-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

We were chasing the sky to change the colour of a star, through the velvet depths of a late summer night, until we catch one, for one single moment. Only for it to be just as suddenly swallowed whole by the hedgerows and curves and bends of the road.

‘You can only change the colour of the star when you are in line with it,’ you say. ‘When you can really see it in the sky. Try again. Now.’

It seems so impossible. It will never happen. The gyrating geography and slip-slide geometry of the road seem to defy catching the star in my sight for anything more than a nano-second. And there are our twin purposes, too, on this crazy roadtrip:

You – driving at breckneck speed to get me on the last train back to Geneva. But also wanting to show me your art.
I – dialling the telephone number of the star but desperately wanting to catch my last train home.

The number is engaged.

A momentary relaxation of the hedges and the curves and bends in the road suddenly gives way again to a forest which tears down the sky, and the star disappears behind clawing branches. More numbers punched in. The number is now vacant. We are lost again. Reduced again to one pursuit – devil-may-care-speed – with now not a single star in sight. Not even a real one.

It seems an impossible mission. And part of me thinks, do I even want to catch this star? Because if I do, will the change in its colour disappoint? The possibility of changing the colour of a star is so much more poetic, that I feel I want to keep that with me, rather than see the reality.

And as the thought comes, it is replaced by that bright star again. Straight ahead. Just there. No doubt about it.

“Here. Let me.” And you take the mobile with your right hand, whilst steering with your left, and punch in the numbers. I think we will crash. Your concentration is more on the phone than the road, your speed doesn’t diminish, and the wheels hit the banks at the side of the road and then veer into the lines which run like knives beneath us. We are on a collision mission - with what I do not know. It is terrifying.

‘Tiens. Ecoute. Has the star replied? It should say Etoile d’Ai.’ And suddenly I hear the voice of a speaking star. Female. Assured. Conspiratorial. But welcoming. 3, 8, 9, 2 , 1 – I punch in a galaxy of numbers, and sure enough, the star changes colour. Just like that. Honestly it does. Orange. Red, Purple. Green. Yellow and then White again. To change the colour of a star by chasing it in the sky – even the reality turns out to be poetic.

`Originally Etoile d’Ai was set up with a telephone company. But they stopped sponsoring the star when the project ended. Just like that. They turned it off.’ You explain.

Sponsoring a star…

“People would try and ring the star from their homes. Or when they were driving by and it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t let the star die. People were so upset.”

A dying star…

“I knew I had a responsibility to the people who could see it. For them, it had become their friend. Their anchor in the world. Which listened – and responded. They could see it from their gardens. Whisper it their dreams.”

Wishing on a star…

“I even got letters saying your star is the only thing which makes me not feel alone in the world. It gives me a real sense of belonging. It also made me feel so small.”

We all bring stars down to earth the moment we are born.
Stars lodge in our bones and shine in the light in our eyes…
For we are made of stardust and hold whole galaxies within
Perhaps that’s why we love them so much
We are all made of stars

“So I found a way round it. The digital world. It opens up even the heavens to all of us. Even artists. Now anyone can call up the star and change its colour. Just as long as you can see it. It’s free.”

I catch my train. You have shown me your work. All our wishes are fulfilled. The magic. The poetry. The practicality. The reality of it all. Existence in one 20 minute drive. All when we were chasing stars through the deep blue of night that late summer’s evening. Flying across the earth – in a vertigo of stars.

Etoile d’Ai
http://www.paysages-en-poesie.ch/a153.html
http://www.paysages-en-poesie.ch/english/a1.html

It's Only a Matter of Time...

2010-08-19T03:53:00.000-07:00

There is a bed at the end of the line. Two pillows side by side, the top sheet turned down. Inviting you to slip between cool sepia sheets. All you have to do, is take the Y bus to CERN, and there it is. A bed. Ready for you. Nakedly present. That is if you notice it at all. The billboard next to it warns in Gothic Germanic script – Es ist nur eine frage der zeit. It is only a question of time.

‘Is it art? Says Josef. ‘I don’t know what art is anymore.’ He puts his head in his hands, in mock despair.

Josef is a mural artist from Texas. He is painting the side of the building which houses the mighty ATLAS detector at CERN. The paints he is using are appropriately made by a company called Lascaux - recalling those earliest marks of humankind.

He has had a day when the art/science question has turned him inside out. I have them too. Just when you think someone understands what you are saying and doing, it all goes upside-down again. It’s been suggested to him that he does a chalk drawing on the ground after he has finished the mural, and that would be a great piece of art, showing the inner workings below ground. He has been shown a sample of what is wanted. Art it aint. Communication it is. It is such a steep hard mountain climb to explain this, so he tells them he doesn’t have the skills. Leaves it diplomatically at that.

What Josef is doing, is taking time on. The artistic tradition and history. That’s what matters. His painting is all about engaging with the history of the mural as the means of depicting and commemorating great and significant events. Think Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Diego Rivera’s Mexican revolutions. Those caves in Lascaux. What is more significant in science at CERN than the collisions at a project which has been over 50 years in the making? Where once there were green fields under the Jura mountains, there is now a whole town, with its bank, post office and travel agency and with hundreds of scattered buildings in a fractal pattern. And all the way along the 27km underground ring, there are mighty detectors, such as ATLAS and CMS, LHcB and ALICE, which can see the invisible. So no wonder Josef wants to mark this moment. And no wonder it is art, because it engages with the tradition of what has gone before and makes science and technology fit for artistic purpose.

‘It’s a Felix Gonsalez–Torres’, says Josef, finally getting off his bike. We both sigh with some kind of relief and look at it, long and hard. Right here at the bus stop under the mountains. In this fractal pattern mock-town. ‘This is art.’ And so the bed turns out to be. So ironic that it is here at CERN, where no-one, but Josef and I, give it a passing glance. So ironic also because of the words on the poster – it is only a question of time. Only last week the Russian press proclaimed that when the LHC is at full speed, it will be the first time machine on earth and we will be able to travel back to the past. How artful is that?

And now suddenly there are beds everywhere. I notice them springing up on billboards on the Route de Servette as I travel back on the tram into Geneva. That same bed. With pillows suggestively blunted as if two heads have laid on them recently. That same deftly turned down sheet, cooly inviting you in. And all the while, these beds mingle with adverts for insurance and investment banking and the ubiquitous watches - those badges of time. The beds are a playful interjection of art between the balance sheets of everyday commercial life in Switzerland. The Fondation Beyeler in Basel, is showing a major Felix Gonsalez-.Torres retrospective, and has playfully let this dead artist loose throughout Switzerland without any fanfare.

The other day Josef pointed out to me another form of time travel – and artistic intervention. This time between the sheets of science. The way art can take you places you never imagined. He tells me about the octagonal Gunbaid Kabud tower in Iran is covered in beautiful tiles in incredibly complex geometric patterns. The tower dates from 1197AD. It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that their mathematics was finally understood by the great British physicist Roger Penrose. An example of science imitating art perhaps? Or messages from the past?

Just as I start noticing these new beds, roadside, as the trams snake through the city, the bed at CERN just as suddenly disappears. Only leaving the warning words beside it. It’s only a question of time. I am waiting for those words to vanish too…but maybe they never will

RANDOM WALK

2010-07-31T12:02:00.000-07:00

Let's go for a random walk. Take steps through the day and see where they lead. Or don't. How they pace and place time. Make sense. Or willfully won't. Plant thoughts which blaze like wildfire and light the mind's sky.

The walk begins like this. With words which spill into the coffee-swirl-beginning of the day. How long is it reasonable to hold a grudge? That's what he asks. Do you think 30 years is too long? It's a lifetime I reply. And he tells the story of his thesis in which he wrote a theory which his professor said was impossible and that he was going to fail him. But this bright boy wouldn't give up. Get real, he said to his professor. Get with it.

Makes you wonder. This confidence. The happenstance of discovery. The application too.
How it can defy belief because it's against the grain of time. Get with it, says the boy again. Get real. Repeats his theory, which now is the basis for our understanding about electrical pulses, and graces every text book. Let's go for a random walk, he says.

In a corner of Eastern Europe there is a country where the book is king. Where in the capital city, a giant book presides over its citizens on a sky-high plinth, like Nelson's column. Its pages are open, and in the bridge into the city the name of the book is inscribed on the arches, like an incantation. To belong to this city, you have to be able to recite the words of the book by heart. And naturally, the author of the book is the country's dictator - his words writ large. Get real. Get with it.

Like Isaac Newton did. Put gravity into the forcefield of our consciousness, however much we dream at night that we can fly through the air like bullets fired by destiny. But then Newton renounced physics to become Master of the Mint. Turning his mind to figuring out how to prevent forgery. And theft. Stop the slivering off of bits of silver from the coins of the royal mint. Made a true likeness of the monarch, rather than a blob of ill-conceived recognition. He borrowed from the Florentines, it is true, but he revolutionised coinage as much as he did physics too. From physics to finance - a numbers game - and not such a short random walk after all. Logical steps of persuasion, of experimentation and of audacity. Of a wish to make a mark and make it good. Get real, even. Get real.

But then Newton tricks us all with alchemy and becomes its most impassioned devotee. Walking the line between art and science, mystery and the explained, the unproven and the proven

Look up random walk, and then you discover a term which traverses many terrains. In physics, random walks are an essential part of quantum theory. In finance, stock market prices evolve according to a random walk and thus they can never be predicted. In computer science, random walks are used to estimate the size of the web. In neuro-science, the firing of neurons. And during World War II, a random walk was used to model the distance that an escaped prisoner of war would travel in a given time.

Get real. The random walk is as random as its name suggests. It measures and unmeasures. It speculates and determines. It fixes and dissolves. It prooves and disproves.

And so back to the boy, who is now a man. The boy who tells me about Newton and the Royal mint. About the grudge which still grips him. The man who said no to him. That his insight was too random. A walk on the wild side. Which led him to Wall Street. And science. And calculating the mass of a neutron stars, and so much more. Nothing is certain on a random walk. Purposefully purposeless. Purposelessly purposeful. Even the steps we make. Let alone the paths we take. Let's go for a walk. Expecting everything and nothing. Who knows what or where?

POSTSCRIPT
Lightening cracks open a sky as fragile as an egg. Rain etcha-sketches the air. A splash at my heels. An umbrella falls from above as if heaven sent. A drowned, wingless crow in this storm, splayed in a puddle. Then a hand. Pick up. An apology. A stretch-flex and push. Umbrella up. A suspended coracle above my head. Nudged in. Warm eyes. Cold breath. A brief respite. Then sudden parting. Just as swift. Slaloming through the spears of rain. He on his way, me mine. Driven by rain drops and the desire to cut through. Who knows how. Where. Or when, if ever, again.

THE SOUND RING OF THE UNIVERSE

2010-07-11T00:25:00.000-07:00

We all have music under our skin. We can't hear it. We can't feel it. But it beats in our blood and pulses our being. It's the music of the stars contained in our bodies held within the scaffolding of our bones. Part of Boethius's vision of music in De Musica - musica universalis, musica humana, musica instrumentalatis, musica divina - the sounds of existence. A cosmic numerology which is the data of our creation, creativity, making and doing.

That's what experiments here at the LHC at CERN with the sonification of data make me think of. They have been putting the sound of particles colliding into audio - blasting our appreciation of what makes us to a new dimension. Instead of only looking at the great visual splashes of particles colliding on a computer screen, which are radiant with data, scientists have also been playing with sound - the auditory waves of the universe - to complete our fields of perception. Slower than the speed of light, nevertheless sound waves are the most accurate way of telling time - of appreciating and comprehending the intervals of existence - the micro-milliseconds in which particles move. The ear is quicker than the eye to recognise the nuances of simultaneity, the near miss, the hit, the interactions, and defractions - grasping more fully and truly than the eye, which is a blunt tool for time.

Go to LHC Sound and you will hear some of the work which is happening at the largest of the CERN experiments, ATLAS, led by University College London physicist Dr Lily Asquith working with musician and programmer Ed Chocolate. LHC Sound as it is called, is the software development phase and already composers and musicians have been emailing them for sound files. It is primarily an analysis tool for the outpouring of data at the LHC - but it is also a way of eavesdropping on what is happening. A cosmic musical whispering which has been funded by the Science and Technology Funding Council to capture also the imaginations of the public.

But the LHC Sound at ATLAS work isnt the only work with sound at CERN. Along the 27km elipsis which is the LHC, other experiments such as ALICE are experimenting with sonification of data too, as heard in the piece I did for Radio 3 earlier this year. Have a listen and you can hear the sound of ionisation of electrons on Kathi Voght's site - . Then you realise that aesthetics comes into this too. What choice of tone do you make to represent the sounds of science?

Particles physics is not the only science latching onto the possibilities of sound. A whole work has just been composed by composer Michael Zev Gordon working with musician-anethatist Dr Andrew Morley based on the individual sequencing of the DNA of each member of a 40 strong choir. Singers are literally singing their genes - and music pours out of it. The connections with contemporary music composition ring in your ears. It is being performed at the Royal Society of Medicine in London on July 13th 2010 and is fittingly called Allele.

So in the age of the visual, which we hold in our hands on our iPads and iPhones and can touch the world into being unfurled before us with a tap of ours fingers before our very eyes, the audio universe is staging its own revolution in perception too, taking us back to who we really are. A note of existence. A beat in time. It sounds like the music of the spheres all over again.

http://lhcsound.wordpress.com/
http://qcd-audio.at/tpc
http://www.rsm.ac.uk/media/pr287.php

SCRIPT FOR PARTICLE COLLIDER - BBC RADIO 3

2010-04-08T04:59:00.000-07:00

So in the end, the challenge of doing a piece for The Verb, BBC Radio 3 - a beginners guide to the words of particle physics...

Here is the uncut version...a response to the beauty of physics, mixing real voices with an imaginary voice, and sonic interpretations of particle collisions as collected from one of CERN"s detectors...fact meeting fiction, vision meeting precision, imagination meeting application...the beauty of particle physics reflected in the form of the piece...

With thanks to the wonderful physicists who took part and who's playfulness made the piece when they became and described their favourite particles - John Ellis, Michael Doser, Alison Lister, Christine Sutton, Henri Bacachou, Luis Alvarez Gaume, and big thank you too, to Katharina Voight for her sonic interpretations of particles colliding.

Listen to the BBC Radio 3 version produced by Laura Thomas http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnsf The Verb on April 9th 2010 at 21.15.

But for the meantime here is the full version for you to imagine...

PARTICLE COLLIDER

An introductory lexicon to the words for some of the particles you will find in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, beneath the foothills of the Jura mountains in the 27km ring. Featuring the voices of scientists who work there...showing the playfulness and imagination of particle physics...

Vox is the guide, who may or may not be in the ring...it is for you to discover. But Vox changes tempi and rhythm as the words themselves deliberately suggest, in the blink of an eye...so when words have deliberate rhymes, the pace is fast and connected and rhymic, running into each other, like particles colliding...the alliteration and repetition is deliberate and a way of conveying collisions...Take-it-Make-It-Hold is as your own for example is said at great speed...and thus the piece reflects the sounds of particles as they interact...the very sounds which Katharina Voight has used to interpret the data of particle physiscs...

Vox is a warm, alto voice - playful and very intimate. She wants you to understand and be as captivated as she is by the world of particle physics and the terms which whirl about.

FX - Sounds of Particles colliding...as collected at the detector ALICE, September 2009

VOX - FEMALE, ALTO
[starting in a hush of intimacy and thought..]

Close your eyes. For one tightly held moment. This moment here. Now. Or there. Back then. A moment ago. A century ago. A day- an-hour-a milli-second ago. No matter. All matter. Any time now... Just take it-Make it-Hold it as your own.

Eyes closed. Pinpricks of light. Picked out. Like an electric tattoo. Neon bright. Necklace tight. Bright-Light-Tight. Falling before your eyes - a curtain of exquisite rain. Beating out time. Deep-earth-down. Muon down. Until we are here. There. Where. In this tunnel. Beneath your feet. Above your head. Side on. Head on. In no place... Some place. No time at all. No matter. It All matters. Words matter. Here. There. In this peculiar, particular, particle universe:

CHORUS: Muon, Smuon, Gravitino, Quark
Proton, Lepton, Neutrino and Squark
[Coming randomly from different parts of stereo image]

VOX : Dimensions slipping and sliding. Watch your step - it is riddled with holes. Your body is a sieve. A billion neutrinos every second pouring through every centimetre of your skin. The mind's footholds - gone. It's Jorge Luis' Borge's library of Babel, in which the books contain all knowledge, but seemingly mean nothing at all. Where, plucking a book off the shelf, means it melts in your hands, words spilling through your fingers to voice their own thoughts:

INSERT Montage of physicists' voices spinning out :
I am a muon...a neutrino... an anti-proton...a gravitino - the best detective...a Gluon

CHORUS
Slepton, neutrino, proton smuon
Electron, Gravitino, squark, gluon
[random spatial stereo placement]

VOX: Let's grab that one. That last one word. Gluon. Hold it fast. Like it's name suggests. Catch it as catch can. Before it slips away:

INSERT: John Ellis as a gluon
Hi I am a gluon. My job is to hold nuclear particles together...so my first job is to hold quarks together inside a proton...so you could say I am responsible for holding the whole thing together. I am quite a colourful character, because quarks come in many colours, red, blue, yellow
[Fade under as it continues]

VOX: [Cuts in] Quarks? Did he say Quarks? Three Quarks for Mr Marks. That line from Finnegans Wake. The babel and babble of books. A subatomic particle with a literary name. Courtesy of James Joyce. And in the world of quarks. There are three too. Just like the good book says.

INSERT: Alison Lister as top quark
I am called Top Quark but I was originally called truth because my friend that's the bottom, used to be called beauty. They used to have strange too. Truth and beauty sounded nice...but the more pragmatic physics named me top and my friend bottom because Strange was always known as middle.

Truth is a much nicer name, top is not bad though because you can imagine top is a very special - sort of top of the pile.

FX

A quark is one of the smallest building blocks around us. The smallest blocks are quarks and leptons - essentially what makes up nucleus - and protons and neutrons are all made up of quarks and gluons which are the sticky stuff which hold them together

You will find me right in the middle of the collisions...I only exist for a short period of time...you wont actually be able to see me but only what I decay into...

FX - FADE UP SOUNDS OF PARTICLES COLLIDING

VOX: Why stop here? Let's meet another. They may be nearly all greek to me - proton, neutron, electron - but here's one with an Italian ending - thanks to the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi.

INSERT: Christine Sutton as a neutrino

Hello! I am an electron neutrino..The electron neutrino was first discovered in 1956, that was more than 20 years after it had been proposed by a physicist called Wolfgang.Pauli. In fact Pauli was embarrassed about his hypothesis about the neutrino because the neutrino hardly exists at all and it wasn't discovered for some time. You cant' see me.

Electron neutrinos come out all the time, from nuclear reactions in the earth or sun.

In the LHC I'll be zipping out of the collisions which make the protons. Other neutrinos identical to me or some with other names. You know I am here, because occasionally like the invisible man I can ping off something and knock something over, like someone walking along the corridor kicking over a wastepaper basket, without seeing them - so that's a neutrino.

FX - Sound of a ping. Done as a sting.

CHORUS:
Hadron, Neutrino, Meson, Tauon
Electron, Gravitino, Photon, Pion

Proton, neutrino, quark, muon
Electron, gravitino, squark, gluon

Muon, Smuon, Gravitino, Quark
Proton, Lepton, Neutrino, Squark

VOX: Words, words everywhere and not a moment to think...in the blink of an eye, a twist of the tongue, names collide:

INSERT Luis Alvarez Gome as gravitino
I am a gravitino. Every time I am produced I can decay if I so desire into a quark or a squark, I always decay into pairs. I am very sociable.

The name was given by Murray Gellman, a great man who gave names. He is the one who invented quarks, and then he imitated Fermi, hence the word gravitino...

If you have nothing better to do, then you invent names, and sometimes stories and theories...[laugh] .You need to be whimsical. Most of the things we are looking at have no names...quarks have colours, tastes and flavours...this is obviously whimsical because they are small, dont last long, and we cant see them...but giving them names you give them pictures...metaphors...

Segue

INSERT Alison Lister
Physics is a very down to earth subject which is why when physcists find names, they try and be as creative as possible and one way in which they express their humour or creative sides.

FX OF Particles colliding...mixed through with a roulette wheel...

Monte Carlo is what we compare the LHC too...casinos...It is a really nice place in the south france...but for us, it is the method that we use to create simulation of the physics which goes on in our detectors...quantum mechanics only predicts a probablily of things and not an absolute outcomes. Monte Carlo probably comes from the fact it has a lots of casinos and that is dominated by probability and so are our simulations techniques.

VOX: [Teasingly] Do you get it now? Is it all making sense? Non sense. All sense? Some sense? All reason and no rhyme. Or all rhyme and no reason. Alice Through the Looking Glass. A real quantum world - if ever I saw one [Irony]:

INSERT: John Ellis as Higgs Boson
Hi I am the Higgs Boson...now I have a very weighty role in particle physics...I feel I do a very important job in the world...If I weren't doing my job...If I do my job too well the sun wouldn't shine

If I were a fairy tale character, I would be the cheshire cat...except I would be the cheshire cat with a smile...but eventually I might become a real cat although so far I haven't been discovered...there were previous rounds which looked for me...Fermilab in the united states...but I have been hidden up until now..I really hate being called a god particle...I really wish people didn't call me this.

VOX: Look...It's behind you..There in the air. A smile. Lunar wide. A melon grin. A cat's tale/tail ready to be told.
[Wonderment]

[BEAT - LIKE AN AFTER THOUGHT]

FX: Sound of particles colliding
[Bring up under I am a proton]

VOX [Excited]: We are on the ultimate collision mission.. This millionth of a second dash-dare. A race against time...and light But wait - one nano second. I am all words, me. A proton. The first. The one which does this ring-riding. The super colliding. A million splashes before last Christmas. Millions more happening now. Meeting myself again and again and again...and all these other particles too...again and again and again and again and again and again and again

[REVERB ECHO and fade under and hold then up the other end]:

CHORUS: Muon, Smuon, Gravitino, Quark
Proton, Lepton, Neutrino and Squark

Hadron, Neutrino, Meson, Tauon
Electron, Gravitino, Photon, Pion

Proton, neutrino, quark, muon
Electron, gravitino, squark, gluon

VOX: again and again and again
[Fading up]

Except....STOP.
[Fear/urgency/assertive for once]

INSERT Michael Doser as anti-proton
I am an anti proton...a designer baby...discovered in the 1960s.

I exist all over the place...half the universe is made of me...at least it was at the beginning...unfortunately it is much lonelier now...and there is no more anti matter in the universe... so I can only be produced in labs but in principle, once I am produced, I exist forever. I am eternal just like protons are.

When I meet my namesake, the proton, we tango around each other in a furious spiral of death..... and then anihilate each other, then once we are both gone, you will know it is me...

VOX: 10.3 million years later....meetings still matter. They all matter. That meeting made matter. The world we live in. The chair we sit on. The tongue in your head. The flowers in the field. The books we read.

But beyond the pages we turn - there's a place like now. A time like now. All like now. But no now. A positive or negative charge of difference. A time-twin, place-twin, particle-twin, lone-twin. Same difference. Somehow. In this parallel world of super-symmetries.

CHORUS
Proton, anti-proton, muon, smuon,
Neutrino, Sneutrino, Lepton, Slepton

Muon, Smuon, Gravitino, Quark
Lepton, SLepton, SNeutrino, Squark

FX OF PARTICLES COLLIDING...

VOX: NOW....
[Firmly and authoritatively. Pause for 3 beats..then...in an intimate hush]

Close your eyes. For one tightly held moment. This moment here. Now. Or there. Back then. A moment ago. A century ago. A day-an-hour-a milli-second ago. No matter. All matter. Any time now... Just Take-it/Make-it/Hold-it-as-your-own.

[FX UP]

ENDS

A Wordful of worlds

2010-02-09T04:56:00.000-08:00

Close your eyes. For one tightly held moment. This moment here. Now. Or there. Back then. A moment ago. A century ago. A day-an-hour-a second ago. No matter. All matter. Any time. Now... Just take it. Make it. Hold it as your own.

Eyes closed now. Pinpricks of light. Picked out. Like a tattoo. Neon bright. Necklace tight. Bright-Light-Tight. Falling before your eyes - a curtain of exquisite rain. Beating time. Drilling down. Deep-earth-down, Until we are here. There. Somehow where. In this tunnel. Beneath your feet.In your dream-sleep. Awake in mind. Beside. Self. I. You. Me. They. Beside. Me. Too.

I am reflecting on the way you can recreate the beauty of particles in writing. This month I am composing a piece for BBC Radio 3 to mark the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider. And somehow, however much I try to stick to the brief - to create a lexicon of terms - I feel it all slipping away, and the impulse is to use words like particles instead - as things which change and mutate, can contain their opposite in the beat of millisecond, meaning and sense appearing only to disappear again.

Like everything to do with particle physics, even if you are a scientist, there is the sheer madness of trying to capture for one fleeting second the invisible and the dichotomy that forces you to face, the looking glass you go through, passing to the other side only to see that you are in two places at once and in no place at all.

Keith Tyson is passionate about science, the way it forges new knowledge and breaks boundaries. In my interview with him in this month's Cern Courier, he makes the case for science and art respecting their differences and being quite separate. And somehow this all makes sense. Because in difference, space and distance, we can fully be ourselves. But both have this in common: art and science are means by which we forge new knowledge and sometimes that is lost in our understanding of them. Whilst science creates knowledge through experiments, tried and tested, art creates knowledge in how we relate to the world, each other and to ourselves.

For artists who engage with science, sometimes the challenge is to stay afloat in the swimming pool of knowledge, as the swiss artist Christian Gozenbach has called it. It is so seductive, that sometimes it feels as if the artist may drown in a pool of understanding, where everything is to be prooved, once the possibilities have been explored.

And so back to my pool of words. How to engage with gravitinos and muons and quarks and convey them to an audience who loves words? Do I dive straight into dictionary definitions, or does the act of writing become the process which, just by being, shows the space-time-gravity of the words which are used to denote particles, some of which, may only exist in the imagination of the scientists who dreamt them up? The creative process...experimenting, exploring, then evaluating...same difference and yet something in between...

The Beauty of the Beast

2009-12-10T07:25:00.001-08:00

So it has finally happened. The great beast under the earth sprang to life this November and protons are hurtling around it at record breaking speeds. And in bunches too. Not just in single beams. The Large Hadron Collider is now the fastest in the world and this is only the beginning. Not only in terms of the universe and how it began, but also meaning the biggest experiment in the world. It has been a journey 25 years in the making, in which the lives and minds of some of the world's greatest scientists, engineers and technicians have been poured into this tunnel under the earth. As one CERN personnel observes, 'All our lives and energy have been subjugated to the beast. We have to feed the beast. It is unthinkable that it fails. If it does, can you imagine the impact it will have on all of us who have devoted our lives to it? It will be as if for nothing.'

It is no exaggeration to say that a whole generation of particle physicists and engineers will be lost if the world's greatest experimental apparatus fails. But that is not all there is at stake. As the LHC ramps up to yet more record-breaking power and new collisions in the New Year, and as the data-deluge breaks all records too, what really is at stake is the future of science itself. Not just particle physics. But all science and the whole quest for knowledge for its own sake. After all, what is the immediate result and application of knowing how and why matter won the battle that critical nano-second 14 million years ago? There is no direct instantaneous application other than the beauty of knowledge itself. And this knowledge won't immediately cure cancer or solve climate change. It might lead in the future to new understanding which may be applied to solve these problems which are politically centre stage and which therefore attract funding. But the relevance may not be for another generation. This is not quick fix knowledge with instant results. The UK government, with its £55 million annual contribution, is rumoured to be closely watching what happens with the LHC, keen to divert the funding elsewhere in an economy in crisis. But so far, it is bravely and resolutely supporting the ultimate Enlightenment project, as the floods of data start pouring in.

This is the beauty of the beast - the human capacity to imagine and create new knowledge to understand existence. Why did matter win over anti-matter? Why do we have star dust in our bones? Why is matter 80 per cent empty? In the end it is also what particle physics is about and why particle physicists seem to be the most alive and curious people about living you will ever encounter. After all, they are perhaps the ultimate definition of what it is to be human - to imagine, to create and to know.

Cloud 9

2009-11-19T03:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday clouds came down to earth. Morning started with great white curls of clouds stretching along the Jura mountains, following every curve, bump and cliff, like an uncanny etcha-sketch echogram. The heartbeat of a November morning at CERN written in the sky. By afternoon, the purest clouds on earth were being created, when the CLOUD experiment went live for the first time. Pure elements of air were pumped into CLOUD's chamber, driven by delicate motors and filters. And there was CLOUD itself...the container which 3 weeks ago looked like a shiney bathyscope lying on its side, now shrouded in a metallic crunchy coating and transformed into something you would encounter on a moon-landing. So much has happened so quickly, with intricate rigging lines and a portakabin turned into a control room, full of the requisite monitors to control the experiment and with a dozen scientists in attendance.

There is alot of brilliance about CLOUD. It is an experiment in which Jasper Kirkby, a leading particle physicist, is working with atmospheric chemists - a unique collaboration. There is also the fact that cloud formation - that most ethereal of creations - is being recreated down here on earth, and that the effects of cosmic rays on the cloud droplets and even ice particles will be studied too. But most of all, there is the sheer enlightenment of the CLOUD enquiry. It is an experiment which may proove that the cosmos has a role to play in climate change. For some, who have battled so hard to get climate change accepted as a human-generated catastrophe, which now politicians accept, this is unpalatable and a knowledge which they dont wish to be publicised. Last year a Scandinavian journalist had her story on CLOUD spiked because it mentioned this fact. Censorship is an emerging phenomenon in the climate change era.

What CLOUD shows is a pure drive for truth and knowledge. Even in this fractured century, in which climate change is now threatening to become a new orthodoxy which no-one should dare effect in any way, CLOUD is going for the pure ideal. It is the real deal. The truth of the matter - knowledge contained in the secrets of a droplet.

The Art of Physics

2009-11-02T02:09:00.000-08:00

The punchline in this Sunday`s Observer newspaper said it all: " If it works, we will have built the most complex machine in history. If not, we will have assembled the world`s most expensive piece of modern art"

This unattributed quote by a physicist at CERN, talking about the switch of the LHC later this month, shows a division in perception about art and science. A redundant machine becomes art. Art is useless - dysfunctional and prohibitively expensive: literally costing the earth. Whilst science is functional and complex, and earth shattering too: it makes history. Breaks the mould of time.

There is alot at stake here. And it`s not just the elegant universe. There seems to be a vast ocean between the worlds of art and science. Yet look at the great detectors at the LHC from an artistic point of view, and you are blown away. Recently Vanity Fair came to CERN, taking the lifts down to the underground at ATLAS and CMS, emerging half an hour later, blinking into the light. The Vanity Fair photographer said he had never seen anything so beautiful. He was incredulous that something so precisely engineered could have such unintentional beauty. Look at the slices which make up the detectors, and they are giant eyeballs, lying on their sides: unblinking, with a steadfast stare. They are looking beyond - across and through time. Or look at them another moment later, and they are great peacock tails, which the German sculptress Rebecca Horn might have created. There is utter beauty in the micromatic precision of the sensors melded with the metal as well as the kaleidoscope of colours too which they display in their components and wiring.

`I cant believe it that these guys dont see the beauty of what they created,' opined the photographer. But the truth is, he couldnt believe either that such beauty could be created without intention. Or that the beauty the scientists judged their machines on was not about form, but totally about functionality. Beauty as utility.

Yet the irony is particle physics and the LHC in particular is predicated on the visual. On the beauty of seeing. The invisible and infinitely tiny particles are detected by these great monolithic machines aglow in their red, yellow, orange, green and silver colours and the shining metal which is calibrated so precisely that it makes these extraordinary structures the as yet unacknowledged 8th wonders of the world.

To think these detectors in the LHC are discovering how the universe started - with such a technologically advanced way of seeing that a particle collision appears on a monitor like a flash, the infinitely invisible made visible. There is such beauty in it. And artfulness too. The art of physics. It takes some beating. Art and science are not that far apart. They both seek meaning. Truth is beauty. Beauty is Truth. They are a blip on a monitor. A twin heartbeat. A pulse. A moment. At any given point. Now

Talking Particles

2009-10-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

Imagine particles could talk. That a gluon pokes its head out of table to chat about the hard work it takes to get others to stick together. Sounds implausible? Anything is possible - even in the real, let alone the quantum world.

That is especially if you watched an obscure French children`s programme called Télé Chat in the 1980s. Which is precisely what Henri Bachachou did. And look at him now. Muon-mad, this Parisian works at ATLAS, the biggest of the experiments at CERN, with over 2000 people worldwide exploring the mystery of matter.

Fed on a diet of Télé Chat, with its lead characters, an ostrich and a cat, and its talking and walking particle zoo, Henri is a particle physicist, with an equally playful mind. But when you get him on the subject - or should it be the matter - of the muon, he becomes messenaic and no longer mild mannered and polite. For him, they are THE particle. In character, they are like an electron, but are 200 x heavier, and in fact their weight is in between an electron and a proton. Every second a 100 million muons are falling from the sky in cosmic rays. And because they are heavy, they can be easily detected, leaving very clear tracks, which are also known as spark lines, because they give off an electric charge.

Which also means that they are invaluable when they are artificially recreated in the LHC. Easily identifiable, they are also one of the clues for finding the Higgs, which is thought to give off muons. And they can pass through matter too and that includes your own body. In fact, a muon hole may be opening at your feet this very nano second - it's just that you cant see it - as muons cascade from the sky and fall from between floor to floor to floor. The world is opening up before you. You just don't know it.

That's how it feels when you are talking about particles. Suddenly you see such endless possibilities in the material world that nothing seems material ever again.

'Have you ever wondered why physicists are so indecisive?' asks Henri. 'Take them to an ice cream counter like gelatomania and you will find they cant make up their minds because they know the whole range of tastes available - and are thinking of the new ones which aren't there too.'

It all makes sense somehow. Talk the particular about a particle, and you have entered into a self-contained fairy tale, which contains its own internal logic of actions and context, but equally could very well not exist at all. And that is on this symmetrical side of the universe. Talk asymmetry, and then we really are talking Alice in Wonderland and through the looking glass. You enter the world of squawking squarks and smuons and sneutrinos...a Finnegans wake of words and playfulness which seems to make no sense at all....

...which may be why the elusive Higgs, whether it is prooved to exist or not, comes as a bit of a relief. A particle with a human name. For the ultimate invisible particle it has a particularly grounded name. But still, let's talk particles...I will find some more physicists who can do just that...and keep you posted.

Gravitys Rainbow

2009-10-27T07:40:00.001-07:00

Talk to a physicist, and you always step into a different dimension. Unwittingly so. Its like diving into clear water and then seeing the stars. The light at first can be blinding, because the accuracy of their vision can be so acute. But then you adjust, dive deeper with them, and discover new vistas. The deep blue has never been more meaning-full.

So I find myself in a room with the man who is writing a paper which is about to change astrophysics. Everyone is standing by for his genius. But no. His bright lazer mind is switched onto other things. We are no longer in a room. We are notes on a musical score. He tells me how 10 years ago he finally learnt the piano. Now he can play Beethoven and it just tumbles out of his mind onto his fingers. You can almost sense he is listening to it, or indeed playing it when he tells me this, his love of this musical dimension is so intense. He tells me also that the way he learns the piece is by diving into it through its harmonic structure. That with the analytical mind of a physicist, he sees the patterns, engages with the harmonies, and totally understands every single note, the why and wherefore of its individual placing. And thus it becomes part of him. So much so, that when trapped in a boring meeting, he seeks refuge by playing a complex sonata in his head and his mind is elsewhere as the patterns rotate and spin.

But switch it all around the other way, and ask him
if music has changed his approach to physics, and he says, it soothes me. He uses it for pleasure. No more, no less. The beauty is the other way round - the way physics makes him approach music with his head, and then his heart comes into play too.

Somehow, at the end of our conversation which was really about something quite other - about Collide, the International Artists Residency Programme I am devising for CERN - it seems totally fitting that Luis volunteers himself for my Radio 3 piece to be a graviton. He of all people will understand the beauty of gravity. He has a levity and gravity which is totally beyond. That of a rainbow.

* Definition of a graviton. The graviton is a hypothetical elementary particle that mediates the force of gravity in the framework of quantum field theory. If it exists, the graviton must be massless (because the gravitational force has unlimited range) and must have a spin of 2 (because the source of gravity is the stress-energy tensor, which is a second-rank tensor, compared to electromagnetism, the source of which is the four-current, which is a first-rank tensor). To prove the existence of the graviton, physicists must be able to link the particle to the curvature of the space-time continuum and calculate the gravitational force exerted.

Sounding CERN

2009-10-19T07:03:00.000-07:00

Think of particle physics, and you think of space, time and gravity as well as the invisible. Sound somehow does not fit into the equation. But of course, at CERN - where else? - there are experiments going on to give particle physics a sonic meaning as well as a visual one.

The young Austrian PHD student Kathi Viogt is currently working at the aptly named ALICE experiment, where time like in Lewis Caroll`s famous tale, is under investigation, as scientists try to liberate quarks and gluons. In the time process chamber, Kathi is turning pure data into sound. When you start thinking about it, of course it makes the most perfect sense. Instead of seeing simultaneous occurences and the split millionth, millionth of a second as particles collide or interact, why not hear them and use your other sense? Time and ears, rather than eyes take you further and the link between music and physics makes sense too.

The Time Projection Chamber contains wires which Kathi is using as if they were the strings of a harp. The wires capture and measure electrons coming from ionised gas set free when they are passed through chosen elementary particles. So when the electrons pass through, the `harp` sounds. The link between the Romantic poets and particle physics has never been clearer. Shelley`s vision of the aeolian harp, invisible except for the sound it makes as the winds of time pass through it, is now reborn in ALICE where you go backwards to come forwards in knowledge, in Kathi`s harp. It sounds just like CERN.

Of clouds and chambers

2009-10-13T02:50:00.001-07:00

In the heart of CERN, in one of the many cavernous warehouses which dot this site, sits a stainless steel chamber. It is polished as brightly as a mirror, with portholes just like a bathyscope, ready for submarinal explorations.

Except this chamber is exploring the sky not the sea. To be more precise, the clouds above our head. It is not just the Large Hadron Collider which is switched on this November. The CLOUD experiment, first dreamt up 12 years ago, will create ice clouds and warm clouds within the steely embrace of this stainless cloud chamber, aglow with ultra violet light beams. The purpose is to understand the mechanism of how clouds form, and the clue is thought to be found in the seeds or cloud condensation nucleii, the little core of which remains the same in any of the trillions of droplets which make up a cloud.

How are they formed? At the moment the idea is theoretical - it has not been tested yet. But the thought and theory is that maybe the electrical charge from the naturally occurring cosmic rays, whose positively charged protons travel 10 million light years, interact with possibly the sulphuric acid in the air to form these cloud seeds. And if this is the case, then perhaps it may tell us more information about climate change and the way too in which clouds operate, protecting the earth. It makes blue sky thinking somehow seem far too unimaginative and the saying to have one`s head in the clouds a true compliment. Could anything be more sublime? As Jasper Kirkby, the physicist and architect of the CLOUD experiment say, looking up at the sky above the Jura mountains, flecked with mares tails or cirus in the Autumn afternoon, there is nothing more beautiful than a cloud.

Under Ice and Sea - Looking beyond and beneath

2009-09-16T06:46:00.000-07:00

Today I learn of telescopes under the sea. In the mediterranean in fact. Which are measuring neutrinos and waiting to find the very rare unstable ones in order to find out more about how the world works. These telescopes have the names Antares, Nestor and of course somehow totally fittingly, Nemo. It is thought by placing these telescopes under the sea, with the refraction of water, these neutrinos may be more easily spotted. But if that is not bizarre enough, deep in the South Pole, there is a telescope embedded in Antartic ice. It is called IceCube. Again, the same purpose. Again a romantic setting, so extreme and a whereabouts so secret too, that it brings to mind HG Wells, Jules Verne and other worlds, and you realise even more that science fiction may be turning into science fact...that one follows the other in an endless cycle of creative discovery and interpretation. It is ineluctible in its beauty.

All this comes to light when I sit with my office mate Arnaud, learning about the 30 year old discipline - Astro particle physics. Neither pure astronomy, or pure particle physics, but a fusion of the two, this emerging science used to be regarded with deep suspicion and is a term which has only started being used since the 90s. But with the rise of technology which can probe so deeply into the subatomic world, measuring the elusive cosmic ray and capturing them however fleetingly at last, astro-particle physics is coming of age.

And if the worlds of ice and water are not enough, there are also deep underground chambers which are being used too, to look at neutrinos - the great discovery of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Every second from CERN, billions of neutrinos are sent through the earth across the continent, beneath the Vatican to Gran Sasso Laboratory 120km east of Rome in Italy. The idea is to try to capture the one which will interact with another atomic nucleus, because they may contain the secrets of how the Universe exists. The exception will proove the rule. And the rule is, that neutrinos tell us how the sun shines and may have been the vital ingredient which led to the disappearance of anti-matter when matter became the dominant force in our world.

If this all sounds too theoretical, just look beyond. Astro-particle physics is said to have potential application for the environment. Deep in the heart of the Argentinian pampas, 3000 km2 is covered by light detectors. This technology can be used to monitor the atmosphere. And in a world under seige, this technology more than ever is needed...

Somehow, fittingly, that afternoon I am at a lecture at the UN given by Jeffrey Sachs. At the end, many of us are in tears and he has a standing ovation for 10 minutes. It is an extraordinary moment when he exorts the world to realise the catastrophe we have released on ourselves in the shape of climate change, and what we do know about it, is only the best news. The worst is yet to come, and we cant sit, pontificate, and deal with climate change as if it is trade negotation or a political football. It aint. He proposes an ecological capitalism, in which the environment and ecology are finally aligned and the values are placed in the survival of the planet and not in the banks.

"We're in the age of this planet where human activity dominates the earth's processes," he said. "Humanity has become so large in absolute number and in economic activity that we have overtaken earth processes in vital ways to the point of changing the climate, the hydrologic cycle.

Listen to his speech at http://www.unctad.org/Templates/meeting.asp?intItemID=2068&lang=1&m=17423

and see if you can remain unmoved. Like the physicists at CERN, somehow Jeffrey Sachs takes immensity, in his case in world economics and the environment, and transformed it into an equation and series of solutions which could transform the way we live in our world....

The Line of Beauty

2009-08-15T02:07:00.000-07:00

There is a line of beauty which connects us in the world. That is what the photographer says. The man with the faraway eyes who always looks closely beyond. Beyond the walls of Avignon, beyond where he was as a fashion photographer caught in the lure of gold and glamour, beyond where he always is...the woods, the trees, the town, the streets. He sees the invisible. It is a thread he passes on to me....

Trust that invisible line, and you find yourself in the places where you should be. It is inevitable. A synchroncity with intent. A determination with chance. A predestination with no destination. It is just the way it is. Here. Right now. In this place. In no time at all. In all time. Even. More or Less.

So the line of beauty leads me to the home of the Beauty Quark, one of the world's greatest adventures. They think the impossible here and make it possible. That's the ultimate beauty of CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world and one of the world's greatest examples of global collaboration. 20 countries are signed up yet 31 others join in the quest to discover the origins of the universe. Diversity yet unity of intent, the possible making the impossible real, it is an extraordinary spirit of place and purpose and something I have always believed could exist. Here at the foothills of the Jura mountains it does. With engineering feats so incredible that your eyes blink, machines as high as cathedrals built beneath the earth. The beauty of ALICE all primary colours of green and red, a great octagonal mouth of awaiting discovery, this particular detector is the one which will detect the particles after the Big Bang, the moment a few millionths of a second, when matter won over anti-matter to be the prime constituent of our universe.

Go to LHCb, and this is where the Beauty Quark will be detected. If the Beauty Quark is found here, then Quantum Physics as it stands makes sense and the Higgs Boson will have been discovered. The theory will stack up and it will be confirmed that we live in a quantum world of asymmetry. After all the theory goes, everything in our universe has its asymmetrical twin. For matter, there is anti-matter, quarks, anti-quarks, electrons, anti-electrons. We exist in this world because of asymmetry and it makes us individiually me. Think on it. Somewhere in the world for each of us walks our assymetrical twin. A me who is anti-me. There will be a kink which makes them different. Just a kink. Think on it again. This minute difference created everything around us, when matter won over anti-matter in that moment when the world exploded into being, because for every one billion anti-particles, there were one billion and one particles. A minute difference makes us whole.

And so to the Beauty Quark. Beauty quarks did not survive this epic battle of creation and do not exist in the Universe today. But right after the Big Bang they existed in great numbers, and so perhaps, they hold the key as to why and how matter won out. And the collisions at the Large Hadron Collider will bring them back to life, for the first time in 13.7 million years, producing millions of them under our feet at CERN.

So...the line of beauty. It is a trace of time, an invisible signature as it is called here, to be made visible this November. What would my photographer say, when the protons collide underground across borders of knowledge, time and space, geographical,cultural and intellectual boundaries? Just one proton colliding with another in the 27 km Large Hadron Collider circular tunnel which runs beneath the French and Swiss border, with the four giant detectors, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE standing guard to trace the miracle moments before and after the creation of the universe. A crossing. A circuit. A line. A collision. An interaction. So do you think you can ask me why I am here...? The answer is here.