Cern, The Divine Comedy and All That
The links between Dante's The Divine Comedy and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are deeper than one might imagine.
Having just gone through a sharp career change from writing a biography of Dante to preparing a television documentary about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, I have found myself searching for a connection between these two apparently widely disparate projects. The fact that I have managed to find one highlights a thread which runs through the history of ideas.
The connection lies in the desire to find an overall principle which explains the complexity of the universe. This, as I expect you know, is the stated aim of the scientists at CERN: they want to find the equation which underlies all events in the universe. That is their principal goal and finding the pesky, elusive Higgs boson will serve only to confirm that they are on the right track, probably.
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