The Photography At CERN Is Helping Solve The Mysteries Of The Universe

Everyone’s favourite mega-machine, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, is meant to help humans some of the most basic questions about the nature of our world. How it goes about this is — in a word — complex. But part of it involves a bit of good old-fashioned (kind of) photography.

This documentary put out by the Carnegie Museum of Art takes you inside a couple of different projects at the LHC, both of which use photography in their study of particle physics. One such project is AEgIS, which uses analogue photographic emulsion to capture the trajectories of anti-protons as they are smashed into a surface. The other project is the ATLAS Pixel Detector, which is actually an enormous digital camera.

In the process of all this science, some really interesting questions are raised about the nature of photography. Not gonna lie, this video gets deep, and it could turn your brain into a pretzel. It’s a 24 minutes that is entirely worth watching, for art and for science!

This video is the final episode of the Invisible Photograph series of docs, which explore the nature of photography in various forms. You can see previous episodes, which are all fantastic, here.


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