Collider: Step Inside the World’s Greatest Experiment: 13 November 2013–5 May 2014, Science Museum, London

Introduction

The narration of a discovery process is a serious challenge for any museum. Displaying discoveries in particle physics is even more so. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) has all the features that historians label “big science”: big budgets, a complex management structure, a large scientific workforce, and cutting-edge technologies for experimentation. Superlatives almost inevitably enter any summative popular description of research at CERN, as it seems easier to absorb record numbers than the complex laws of particle physics. But how do they all fit into a museum exhibition?

In its temporary exhibition Collider: Step Inside the World’s Greatest Experiment, the London Science Museum has taken a number of risks beyond the challenge of exploring a scientifically difficult subject. Five of these risks are particularly significant. First, the impossibility of reproducing the scale of the experiment requires a well-thought-out scenographic response. Second, the choice of a university-level science subject for a paid-entrance temporary exhibit targeting adult audiences may seem strategically questionable from a marketing perspective. Third, managing the dialogue with a single influential institution employing its own powerful science-communication workforce challenges exhibitors who are seeking to maintain independence in the development of content. Fourth, to conduct research on an ongoing scientific experiment is to aim at a moving target. And finally, planning an international tour with little prior experience in traveling exhibitions adds to the overall complexity of the task.

The Science Museum should be admired and congratulated for carrying on in the face of such risks and delivering a finished exhibition. The museum’s management and scientific team have made a strong statement about the possibility of science and technology museums becoming involved with current research in large, popular formats, thus raising the bar for other institutions with similar orientations.

Exhibition Structure

The exhibition can be divided into eight sections: a preentrance with historical exhibits; an introductory film; the exhibit space surrounding the beam source; an arc of the LHC tunnel; a cinema with a virtual path through the LHC; a section on detector technologies; a hall re-creating CERN’s scientific staff’s offices; and a closing room highlighting contemporary scientific questions.

Before entering the exhibition, an “anti-chambre” highlights objects connected to the history of particle physics from the physics collections of the Science Museum, as well as selected objects from CERN. Visitors are greeted by the “entrance elephant,” a curatorial jargon term for a room-filling exhibit initiating the mood for the rest of the exhibition: a 1989 accelerating copper cavity from the experiment preceding the LHC at CERN, the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP).¹ With its size, weight, and technical sophistication, the object is a reasonable choice for a symbolic, eye-catching exhibit: massive, opaque, complex. No attempt is made to explain the various components of the cavity, and while one can possibly guess the direction of the beam and the location of focusing elements and magnets, the precise function of this artifact remains a puzzle to most visitors. However, it does fit the logic of the overall conceptual framework. The Collider exhibition does not attempt to instruct visitors on the complexity of experimental particle physics; instead, its developers seek to recreate the “ecosystem” of discovery and knowledge production at CERN, including some of its staff members, within central London.

To the historically interested visitor, this room contains some of the most fascinating landmarks of twentieth-century atomic and particle physics: Carl Anderson’s (1905–1991) cloud chamber photograph of the discovery of an antiparticle, the positron, along with the cloud chamber (in a sense one of the first particle detectors) of Nobel laureate Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (1869–1959); and a replica of the 1931 Lawrence-Livingston eleven-inch cyclotron used at Berkeley from which many generations of particle accelerators followed. Documents surrounding the birth of CERN in 1952 are displayed, drawing historical connections to the post–World War II development of particle physics—a development strongly driven by the scientific...