Curator Ali Boyle on how the Collider team are installing some of the larger objects in our new exhibition.
It’s just three weeks to go until Collider opens with a flurry of exciting events. Which means that we’re getting to the best part of exhibition work – after all the planning, the objects are finally starting to make their way onto gallery.
That’s sometimes easier said than done when your objects come from CERN. A few are so large that we’ve had to install them on gallery early and build the rest of the exhibition around them. First up was the object we call The Beast, a 2-tonne section of one of the giant dipole magnets that keep the LHC’s particle beams on course.
Thankfully it was only a section – a whole LHC magnet weighs in at 35 tonnes and is 15 metres long. And our basement gallery is a lot easier to get to than a tunnel 175 metres below ground, the challenge faced by CERN as they upgrade the LHC’s magnet system.
Another 2-tonne behemoth, delivered from CERN that morning, followed – an accelerating cavity from LEP, the Large Electron Positron collider, which previously occupied the tunnel that now houses the LHC. The copper cavity, used in the first phase of LEP operations, looks like something Jules Verne might have imagined.
Of course, being the Science Museum, we’re used to big bits of kit. The LHC objects, although hefty, were a piece of cake compared with getting the planes in. Or handling the 4-tonne Rosse Mirror, which we moved into its current position in Cosmos & Culture in 2009.
Made of speculum, a mixture of copper and tin, the Rosse Mirror is six feet in diameter. It is one of the few surviving original pieces of the largest scientific instrument of its day, the enormous telescope built by the Earl of Rosse at Birr Castle in the Irish midlands and known as the ‘Leviathan of Parsonstown’. The mirror was donated to us in 1914 – here it is being delivered.
There’s a clear distinction between ‘doers’ and ‘watchers’ in this photograph. On Collider this week I was definitely the latter. As those keen observers of the museum world, the Ministry of Curiosity, point out, curators rarely do the actual muscle work.
So, rather than take my word for it, why not ask someone who really knows about moving big bits of particle accelerator around? Lyn Evans (or ‘Evans the Atom’ as he’s dubbed in the press) was Project Leader for the LHC build. Next Wednesday 30 October, thanks to our friends at the London Science Festival, you can hear him talk about the LHC’s engineering challenges at Science Museum Lates. He’ll be joined by Collider‘s very own Harry Cliff, who’ll give a sneak preview of how we’re bringing CERN to South Kensington. Not all of it obviously, as that would be a bit too heavy…
Discover more about the Higgs boson and the world’s largest science experiment in our new exhibition, Collider, opening on 13th November 2013.