The universe (in fireworks)
In its 50th anniversary year, CERN had the honor of opening the 2004 Geneva Festival (Fêtes de Genève).
The Festival traditionally opens with a bang, but this year's was the biggest yet. On July 30, on a warm summer's evening by Lake Geneva, several tonnes of fireworks replayed the early history of the universe.
Starting with the big bang, the display had acts representing inflation, the breaking of symmetries, the clash of antimatter and matter, hadrons and nucleosynthesis, the first atoms and the universe becoming transparent, and the formation of stars and planets.
It was a challenge to translate these very abstract ideas into more than a thousand kilograms of TNT of different color. But, set to the music of The Matrix, Alan Parsons, andJurassic Park, one of the most spectacular physics presentations ever staged dazzled the audience of two hundred thousand spectators.
CERN physicist Rolf Landua, who scripted the narrative and worked with the pyrotechnicians on the realization, said: "From the many enthusiastic and emotional comments that I received from spectators, both from CERN and from outside, I got the impression that we have really touched on an important means of communicating science—by creating emotions."
Gary Haslam, CERN
