Big Bang exhibition at the Science Museum

Some time ago I wrote about Fieldwork for the Science Museum and promised some updates. Back in February we were trying to repair an old spark chamber for an exhibition about the LHC at the Science Museum. The exhibition is now open but the spark chamber isn't there.

Dave spent a lot of time trying to repair the spark chamber and there is still a hope that it will go to the Science Museum. But it missed the deadline for the exhibition opening. The problem was with the trigger. The chamber is activated by two huge scintillators which produce a signal when a charged particle crosses. One is mounted below the chamber, the other is on top of it (it's the kind of gnu horns you can see on the picture in the original post). All the light guides (that guide the scintillation light to the photomultipliers) are broken. They can be repaired but that takes some time. Dave is working on that. As for the chamber itself, it looks OK. It produces nice sparks when activated by an almost random trigger.


The exhibition is essentially a huge cube of 5m size explaining in four zones what the LHC is about, how it works, how the detectors work and how the data will be analyzed. Or, well, as the exhibition is aimed at 14 to 17 year olds, it does not explain that much but gets a feel for how complicated and huge it is. The exhibition is actually called Big Bang (and that's what you'd read from the distance), as it's about recreating the conditions of the Big Bang in a laboratory. The illustrator made a great job drawing particles and collisions. I love his drawing of a cavern with all the ongoing activity! I won't say more. Come to the Science Museum (it's free) and see it.

The whole design process started (for me) in December where I attended a day long brainstorming session with 20 more physicists from various places in the UK. The team from the Science Museum was quite impressive at extracting as much information and ideas from us as they could. Of course many of them were not feasible, like putting a 1:1 picture of Atlas on the wall (rejected as it wouldn't fit: the museum is much too small!) or putting a real Grid node in the museum. Instead there's a lot of graphics, animations and small movies.

Then for several months we got spammed by the designer teams sending us text snippets to check for scientific accuracy. A month ago there was a meeting with the designer who explained us his ideas for the layout. Scientists and designers: two worlds collide... But we eventually managed to speak a common language.


Three weeks ago I got a mail asking if I was happy to be quoted in the exhibition saying "These high-energy collisions will replicate the conditions that occurred in the moments after the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago". I don't remember having ever said that and would have said 14 anyway... They obviously got a lot of quotes from the brainstorming session and wanted to match them with real scientists. So I agreed provided they change the age of the Universe (!). The result is shown in the picture.