By Peter Ginter, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Franzobel
Edition Lammerhuber
Hardback: €64
This large-format, lavishly produced volume in its psychedelic slipcase is a fitting celebration of the “world machine” that is the LHC. To describe it as a coffee-table book is to demean it. Long after the LHC has been superseded, it will remain as a beautiful record of the astonishing complexity and achievement of what currently hums and whirls beneath placid Swiss and French fields.
LHC is built around the photographs of Peter Ginter, master of the demanding craft – and art – of photographing technology and industry. The pictures are complemented by an interview with Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of CERN, and an essay by Franzobel (pseudonym of the Austrian writer Stefan Griebl). Together with the explanatory picture captions, the text (in English, German and French) builds up to provide an excellent layperson’s introduction to the LHC, how it works and what it aims to achieve.
The book divides into sections on the collider, the four big detectors (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb), event displays and computing (“from www to grid”), together with a brief history of CERN and the LHC project.
The photographs are magnificent. To any child or adult unfamiliar with particle physics, and even to people who visit CERN frequently or work there every day, they reveal the LHC and its detectors as a soaring pinnacle of research, built with the precision, coordination and search for truth that informed the great medieval cathedrals, updated to the 21st century.
One photograph shows four Russian workmen perched on a mound of artillery shell casings; a second shows the brass from the casings turned into a wheel of giant golden segments arranged like the iris diaphragm of a camera; and a third shows this huge “wheel” – designed to cause showers of secondary particles after an initial collision – being installed as one of the elements of the CMS detector.
And there is more. A physicist abseils into the gleaming innards of LHCb, like a mountaineer into a crevasse. Pakistani workmen pose beside one of the “feet” on which the 14,000 tonne CMS will sit. Engineers are dwarfed as one of the giant coils of the ATLAS toroid is manoeuvred into position. ALICE’s innermost detector gleams with myriad silicon faces like a futuristic Fabergé egg.
This book is a great photographic feat by Ginter; the result of endless visits to CERN over many years. Each picture has been planned, negotiated, composed and lit, representing many hours of work and inspiration.
Edition Lammerhuber has produced a magnificent volume to the highest publishing standards. Everyone concerned with or interested in CERN should have a copy. I also urge the publishers to produce an e-book version that could reach a mass audience worldwide. These pictures would look glorious on a tablet computer.
