Promoting the LHC with a New Age video

Last Friday I received an e-mail entitled “LHC video by Bob Dylan’s son.” When I clicked on the link inside, I thought the link was out of date. What appeared on my screen was not the Large Hadron Collider, its mammoth detectors, nor anything obviously to do with particle physics.

Instead, the five-minute video opens with shots of a little boy wandering about in a forest, as an unknown narrator talks about the names of birds in different languages. So far, so New Agey, I thought, but the video soon shifts its attention scienceward to the 19th-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, whose dogged study of Earth’s animals and plants led him to propose a theory of evolution independent of Charles Darwin’s.

Next comes Brian Cox, a member of the collider’s ATLAS team, who discusses links between art and science. Pictures by William Blake, Leonardo da Vinci, and other artists flash by.

The images of the LHC that fill most of the remainder of the piece are eye-catching, even beautiful. Aesthetically, they hold their own against the photos and drawings of nature and the works of art that precede them. The instruments of particle physics, if not perhaps the science itself, are beautiful, the video seemed to say.

But the video offers another, possibly contradictory point of view—that of Richard Feynman, who appears in extracts from archival interviews. Feynman says that nature is what it is. We might want to find a single ultimate theory but, he warns us, reality could consist of millions of onionlike layers.

That nature at its most fundamental level should be as beautiful as nature at its highest level is a prejudice, a hope, and possibly a mistake.