CERN, the centre for particle physics in Europe, has been smashing its way through the subatomic world for the past 50 years. Alison Abbott finds out what's in store for the future. During CERN's routine maintenance shut-down in 1999, acrobats and mime artists turned one of the vast halls within the laboratory's 27-kilometre tunnel into a stage. Light and shadows played around the nine-storey cavern, illuminating a poetic ballet of aerial gymnastics. On ropes, trapezes and ledges, the performers enacted Paul Dirac's creative struggle with his 1920s theory of antimatter and his pessimistic belief that such theories could never be confirmed experimentally. In the show's final scene, the huge backdrop parted to reveal the DELPHI experiment, where for the past decade CERN physicists have been observing collisions between electrons and positrons, their antimatter counterparts.
展开▼
