By Stanley Greenberg; Introduction by David C Cassidy
Hirmer Verlag
Hardback: €39.90 SwFr53.90 £39.95 $59.95
The American photographer Stanley Greenberg travelled 130,000 km over five years to create the 82 black-and-white photographs included in this large-format book. They are a record of the extraordinary and sometimes surreal complexity of the machinery of modern particle physics. From a working replica of an early cyclotron to the LHC, Greenberg covers the world’s major accelerators, laboratories and detectors. There are images from Gran Sasso, Super-Kamiokande, Jefferson Lab, DESY and CERN, as well as Fermilab, SLAC and LIGO, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, IceCube at the South Pole and many more.
The LUNA experiment at Frascati is like a giant steel retort-vessel suspended in the air; a LIDAR installation at the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory in Argentina is a fantastically hatted creature from outer space bearing the warning “RADIACION LASER”; and the venerable 15-foot bubble chamber sits on the prairie at Fermilab like a massive space capsule that landed in the 1960s. (Who knows where its occupants might be now?)
Not a single person is seen in these beautiful images. They are clean, almost clinical studies of ingenious experiments and intricate machines and they document a world of pipes, concrete blocks, polished steel, electronics and braided ropes of wires. Greenberg has said that his earlier books, such as Invisible New York – which explores the city’s underbelly, its infrastructure, waterworks and hidden systems – are “about how cities and buildings work”, whereas Time Machines is about “how the universe works”. More accurately, perhaps, it is about the things that we build to help us understand how the universe works – but here the builders are invisible, like the particles that they are studying.
In a book whose photographs clearly demonstrate the global nature of particle physics, David Cassidy, author of an excellent biography of Werner Heizenberg, includes a one-sided introduction, concentrating on US labs and achievements. Accelerators are “prototypically American” and his main comment on the LHC is that the US has contributed half a billion dollars to it and that Americans form its “largest national group”. There are also inaccuracies: electroweak theory was confirmed by the discovery of the W and Z bosons at CERN in 1983, not 1973; and the top quark discovery was announced in 1995, not 2008. The introduction does not do justice to Greenberg’s excellent and wide-ranging photography but, fortunately, nor does it detract from it.
