Awesome Science
An image of the Collider in the Science Museum show
One of my favourite sketches by the comedian Eddie Izzard discusses his disgust at popular over-use of the word awesome. He suggests a scenario in which astronauts experiencing the wonder of space are unable to describe their experience to ground control because 'awesome' has come to describe something as prosaic as a hot dog.
This sketch came back to me last weekend, when I was at the Science Museum, as the current exhibition Collider made me think similarly about communicating the uncommunicable. Collider is an ambitious exhibition trying to explain the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. We've all heard of the LHC thanks to the fear that research there might create a black hole, and therefore the end of the world, but more thanks to their success finding the Higgs boson. But how many of us have any idea what that means? In some ways I think it's a bit like how longitude entered public discussion in the 18th century, becoming a cultural keyword not necessarily with underlying scientific understanding.
What Collider does is to explain the LHC within the context of what it is like actually to work at CERN. An opening video introduces you to a number of characters working at the facility, their hopes, fears and dreams, and starts to explain what it is they work on. Then you enter a space built to feel like the corridors and spaces of CERN, with photographic reproduction of walls of notice boards and office spaces, as much as enormous and beautiful, but bewilderingly complex pieces of technology. White boards with simple text and diagrams explain the science behind colliding hadrons, and clipboards with briefing documents explain the history of research on the site. Nice human touches proliferate, like a bicycle showing how researchers get around the tunnels.
About half-way through a projection space gives you a representation of the vast inside of the collider, with a very sci-fi feel reminiscent of the film TRON. This contrasts nicely with the ordinariness of the many of the spaces you walk through, interspersed with the sheer intricacy of the pieces of technology. In evoking the feel of futuristic film, I thought the projection helped to show real science as more prosaic.
Collider makes an admirable attempt to explain complex science. I'm not sure how clear an understanding I left with, yet am equally unsure that I could have. But I certainly left impressed with the way that the exhibition evoked what it's like to do such awesome science.