Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Climb into a Victorian ice well to discover

Clamber down the two ladders that lead into the Victorian ice wells of London's Canal Museum until 20 October and you'll be greeted by a shimmering mass of perspex discs suspended from the ceiling. The 380 floating discs that make up Covariance, the art installation current displayed in the wells, are studded with 28,000 glass beads and are arranged into around 20 different designs, representing the work of particle physics detectors.

Particle physicist Ben Still from Queen Mary University London and artist Lyndall Phelps have collaborated on the installation for the Superposition project through the Institute of Physics' artist in residence programme. Covariance has been nine months in the making altogether, including three months of fourteen-hour days to complete its construction.

The pair were introduced by the Institute and given the brief of creating a physics installation for public display. Rather than focusing on one particular area of agate beads, they decided instead to look at the machines that make the science happen -- particle physics detectors.

"These [are] massive machines used to see the smallest bits of nature," Still tells Wired.co.uk. The installation aims to show the way in which the detectors build up a picture of how these tiny particles interact with each other on a larger scale, as well as reflecting the way the electronic data collected by the detectors is then used to create plots on computers.

Still showed Phelps many pictures of particle detectors, which are generally huge and impressive structures, and she "fell in love" with one in particular called Super-Kamiokande, which is buried under Mount Kamioka in Japan.

"I showed her some of the plots I was making for an analysis I was developing and again she was quite struck by how we took data from this massive machine and made these colourful plots to try and extract information." The colour running through the installation, says Still represents "the way in which the data is presented finally".

Many particle physics detectors, especially the ones in neutrino physics -- the field in which Still works -- are buried deep underground to try and negate the impact of the cosmic rays and particles constantly showering down on us, which creates "quite a turbulent environment" on the Earth's surface.

"To see very rare things, you have to get rid of that first, so you have to go deep underground," says Still. "We're trying to hear a faint whisper above a rock concert, so if you go underground the rock concert is muffled so much that you can actually start hearing that whisper coming through, and that's exactly how we're trying to see these neutrinos."

Detectors aren't just buried under the ground, but also under ice and water, making the underground ice wells, which used to store ice and are below the waterline of the canal, the perfect location to host Covariance.

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