Interactive exhibition
Client:
Max-Planck-Institut für Physik
DIMENSION: 300 m2
Completion: 2011
Large Hadron Collider Open Day
Munich
Great was the excitement when the world’s largest particle accelerator, the “Large Hadron Collider” (LHC) began its work at the CERN research institute near Geneva in 2009. The prospect of “simulating the Big Bang“ was cause for all kinds of speculation, including the (unfounded) fear that the LHC could produce black holes that would swallow up the world.
But what was the researchers’ real motivation for building such a gigantic machine (with a circumference of 27 km), and what good would such research be to me personally? These were the exact questions the Max Planck Institute for Physics aimed to answer by staging a major exhibition in Munich entitled “Large Hadron Collider Open Day” to mark the second year of operation of the LHC. With this in mind, the institute sought the professional services of Die Werft.
We ran several workshops with CERN scientists before coming up with a suitable concept for giving people a hands-on experience of the particle collider in Munich. We decided to recreate the control room of a specially developed device of the Max Planck Institute, the so-called ATLAS detector, inside the exhibition rooms. This allowed visitors to witness a particle collision on the big screen and see for themselves how new matter is created. The awe-inspiring simulation was flanked by numerous authentic and hands-on exhibits in order to make the highly complex world of particle physics something visitors could experience for themselves in a (quite literally) tangible sense.
