Quilts inspired by the Large Hadron Collider

Last week, while I was on a train, researchers at CERN announced that neutrinos are probably not traveling faster than the speed of light. Last year, as you'll recall, the OPERA experiment clocked the neutrinos breaking that speed limit. Unfortunately, it looks like those measurements were probably caused by one or more problems with the GPS system used to synchronize clocks between the neutrinos' point of origin and where they were speeding off to.

That's disappointing news. To make up for it, I offer you this art chaser—a gallery of beautiful quilts inspired by CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

The quilts are the work of artist Kate Findlay, and they're completely amazing. The one pictured here is called "Inner Eye." It's based on ATLAS, one of the major detectors built to encircle the Large Hadron Collider and collect information on what's going on inside it. Comparing the photo with the quilt makes both images doubly awesome.

See the rest of the quilts at Symmetry Magazine

Via Alexandra Witze

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: Art and Design • beauty • CERN • disappointment • FTL neutrinos • LHC • physics • Science

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robotnik

Why is the news that the OPERA results were incorrect disappointing? I’m no physicist, but would that not have thrown quite a wrench in the works of our understanding of the universe?
- http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  Yes. And that would have been awesome.
  
  Here’s the thing: Your average scientist is actually really, really excited when it turns out we don’t understand the universe as well as we thought we did. That kind of failure is not a bug, it’s a feature. Oh, they’ll try like hell to disprove a finding like this, because anything that purports to upend our understanding of the universe needs to be poked and prodded and subjected to every counter-attack possible. But if it stands up to that, and we have to re-write the science textbooks? That’s awesome.
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

It’s lovely…what’s causing the 3-D effect with the white eye shaped piece?
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=642731374 Ernst Schneider

Odd subject material.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1038343605 Erik Peterson

You see Large Hadron Collider, I see Autobot Matrix of Leadership.
http://www.facebook.com/bill.mcgeachen Bill McGeachen

Beautiful. I just can’t figure out why I always read it as “hardon”.