The life of Paul Dirac, The Oracle of Delphi

a show performed at CERN, Geneva

Deep under the European Laboratory for Particle Physics — CERN — in the huge space provided by the cavernous loading bay that serves LEP (the Large Electron–Positron collider) and its associated DELPHI antimatter experiment, the life of Paul Dirac is being played out nightly in an impressionistic show of acrobatics, dancing and light effects.

Credit: CERN

Dirac, the Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist who predicted the existence of antimatter in the 1930s, writes to Werner Heisenberg about his struggle to understand the nature of matter. His muse helps him untie the knots in his mind and derive his mathematical proof for antimatter. His dreams take him into space to search for the antimatter he believes must be there, as he finds no proof for it on Earth. His disappointment and self-doubt — “if only I could test antimatter close-by” — turn to wonder when, in the last of four scenes, the backdrop suddenly opens to reveal DELPHI, the experiment that allows experimental physicists to study the interactions of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.

The Oracle of Delphi was created as a CERN outreach activity and has been enormously successful. It is almost sold out to the end of its run, mostly with locals from Geneva. Before the performance, the audience is given a short lecture in particle physics, and then descends to the loading bay — 100 metres below the ground — for the show. Afterwards, they are taken around a LEP experiment. The show's artistic success, which is certainly helped by the drama of the space in which it is performed, is in part due to a concise script by Anne Gaud McKee, a molecular biologist from the University of Geneva, and the professional acrobats and mime artists who perform.

The Oracle of Delphi will run until 27 February 2000 (when LEP, currently switched off for winter maintainance, comes back into operation).