Houghton, Michigan — Particle accelerators are massive structures, used to find the tiniest details of our universe. Scientists around the world flock to these facilities to try out theories, hunt for particles and seek to understand a fully unified theory of physics.
But one Michigan Technological University alumnus is using a particle accelerator to create works of art.
The Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois was a proton-antiproton collider and the highest energy accelerator in the world until the LHC(Large Hadron Collider) at CERN (the European organization for nuclear research) came on line. It was also the first superconducting synchrotron (a type of particle accelerator) and the largest application of superconducting technology in the world at the time.
Todd Johnson’s work at Fermilab was failure analysis and prevention. But he’d always been interested in art, “particularly as art relates to science,” he says. “Fermilab’s founding director, Robert Wilson, was also a sculptor, and a lot of the architecture here shows that influence. My first serious foray into this field was in the early 1990s, when I began making white-light holograms.”
Then he found other scientist-artists, and they began producing Lichtenberg Figures (sculptures making use of branching electric discharges) in acrylic plastic, using the particle accelerator. Soon he was creating his own art pieces.
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