If da Vinci had designed the Large Hadron Collider
Novelists may have made the work of Leonardo da Vinci fodder for the popular imagination, but it may take a scientist to truly appreciate and appropriate the master’s style. Such is the case with CERN’s Dr. Sergio Cittolin, who, when he’s not frittering his time away on physics, likes to do drawings of the LHC in the da Vinci tradition.
As he explained to Symmetry magazine:
As a naturalist, da Vinci probed, prodded, and tested his way to a deeper understanding of how organisms work and why, often dissecting his object of study with this aim. “I thought, why not present the idea of data analysis to the world within the naturalist world of Leonardo?” Cittolin says. In the drawing below, the CMS detector is the organism to be opened; the particles passing through it and the tracks they leave behind are organs exposed for further investigation.
We assume Leonardo would heartily approve.
Art and science: A match made in heaven.Posted by Kate Rinsema