Art plus physics? Sheer Chemistry.

"Sein, oder nicht sein. Das ist die Frague," repeats a woman in a cadmium -red dress standing in the dark as she swings a large luminous bulb in a circle. The looping bulb at the end of an electrical cord whirs through the air leaving a circular trail of light. It is an oddly entrancing and eerie image. And as you are drawn deeper into the rhythm, it becomes increasingly uncertain  how much the woman is indeed propelling the light source, and how much she  herself is being controlled by it's centrifugal forces.
     I am in Geneva watching a film of a woman uttering those famous opening lines of Hamlet's soliloquy in German, and hearing an artist talk about science...
     The revolving light bulb symbolises those experiments at CERN,  in which subatomic particles are hurled around a 27km - long tunnel, colliding at the speed of light.
     What we are witnessing is being billed as the crossing of two academic cultures, no less, a meeting of artistic and scientific minds, 40 years after CP Snow warned of a damaging divide between the two intellectual communities, separated by misunderstanding and mistrust.
     The woman in the red dress is modern art with a new twist. I must confess that I find much of today's abstract art baffling at the best of times. But here armed with a doctorate in theoretical physics from a dim and distant past, I am in my element. Those Shakespearean words speaking of being and not being, you see refer to the formation of antimatter and matter in the gigantic circular atom-smashing machine at CERN. For once, I can see the light. Yet there is still some explaining to do. So I ask Professor ken McMullen, artist, film director and creator of this film, "Lumen de Lumine", about his new work.
     McMullen appears as well versed in Einstein and Heisenberg as Emin and Hirst; he kindly answers my questions. Why German? it is of course the language of Shrodinger, einstein and 20th Century physics. mcMullen reveals how the film took place in a deep 
underground bunker at CERN, and the surroundings were actually once part of the tunnel walls that witnessed those high speed particle collisions which reveal to physicists the tracks of the basic building blocks of nature.
     A Cern theorist, John March Russell, who worked with McMullen on the project, argues that theoretical physicists have much more in common with artists than, say, social scientists, approaching problems in a similarly abstract fashion. This is how things used to be before the two cultures split during the 20th century. Polymaths such as Leonardo Da Vinci were not so constrained by disciplinary boundaries. These days there are also very pressing practical reasons for scientists and artists to set up mutually beneficial partnerships. It is a   straightforward deal: art yearns for academic respectability, while science desperately seeks popularity.  The academic formalisation of research in the visual arts in particular is relatively recent, but the arts community is campaigning for more recognition and funding. "We see artistic creation as analogous to research in that it involves an original contribution to knowledge," says Michael Benson, director of communications at the institute, which secured a world-class research rating of 5 in the 2001 research assessment exercise. 

     But can art help science to be more creative? One reason for the declining interest in science is that it has become so specialised now that it takes too long to do all the groundwork needed to reach the cutting-edge boundaries of knowledge. And scientists have assumed a more business-like and conservative approach to their work: committees find it near impossible to fund truly adventurous research proposals; and a minuscule number of academic papers are now genuinely groundbreaking. McMullen says: "Institutional life for the scientist or artist can be difficult if you are an experimenter, simply because there is no clear path or precedent. Artists are trained to lose themselves, and then find something out from this, breaking down presumptions. It is not so easy to do that in science." 
 

Lee Elliot Major. Extract Guardian, Feb. 2002