by Federico Brunetti (ed.), Editrice Abitare Segesta. Hardback ISBN 9788886116930, €50.
With 350 photographs in about 150 pages, The Rings of Knowledge is a beautiful photographic collection interspersed with some text, whose role in putting over the message is almost peripheral. The book is bilingual, English and Italian, and so is aimed at an international audience.
The authors and editor have succeeded in illustrating the Italian contribution to CERN and the LHC. The book particularly emphasizes the role of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Research (INFN) and its involvement in leading worldwide scientific projects, of which the LHC is the flagship. The pride in contributing to the “LHC era” – as defined by the president of INFN, Roberto Petronzio, in the foreword – sometimes causes the authors to fall into the trap of excessive self-celebration. Statements such as “The LHC could not have been realized without Italy’s collaboration” apply equally to many other member states of CERN and could be badly perceived by an international readership.
The most distinctive feature is that Federico Brunetti, the editor, is an architect and photographer from the Industrial Design, Arts and Communication Department of Milan Politecnico. The chapters “The LHC between science and architecture” and “Physics as design” show his astonishment with the “enormous machines”, “enormous dimensions”, the “never-before-seen extremes of the place”. However, they also show that communication is an issue for any specialized discipline, including architecture.
The wording of these chapters is complex and the concepts are described with a sort of jargon that makes reading difficult. In particular, the concept of “beauty” in design and in physics is mentioned several times and in different places but is never really presented in a clear way. This is a pity because it would have been an interesting point to develop in a comprehensible way.
Back to the main point of the book: I found the photographs really amazing. The square layout is based on Fibonacci’s geometric series and shows the link between physics and design. Unfortunately, even this fascinating point is not clearly explained in the text. For example, one caption on page 25 helps the reader’s intuition but simpler phrasing would significantly increase the overall enjoyment of the book.
