“Bringing art and science together can provide answers to our miscomprehension of the world”

Bringing together scientific experiments and artistic reflections is a process that is gaining momentum. The two worlds, often perceived as closed for most people, can, through dialogue, bring out a better understanding of what surrounds us, of what escapes us. The unknown, the distant, the different can then become familiar, and enter our intimate sphere.

Like the new exhibition at the Milan Triennale "Unknown unknown", conceived by Ersilia Vaudo, astrophysicist and head of diversity at the European Space Agency, it involves designers, architects, artists, playwrights, and musicians, and offers a reflection on our own ideas of the world. It also seeks, through artistic and scientific channels, to raise questions about what we "don't know yet."

The environmental changes that today disrupt our daily lives generate incomprehension, and loss of references. New fundamentals must be found, to continue to build, to imagine life. Art can therefore make science more human.

The physicist Michael Doser, researcher in particle physics at CERN for more than thirty years, is convinced that bringing the two worlds together can create a richness that is useful to all. The "Arts at CERN" program is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. Little known to the general public, this program has been hosting artists in residence for a decade, for a few weeks or a few months. Michael Doser has known many of them, and has often helped them along the way, in the course of their reflections or in the underground mazes of CERN. His curiosity, his ability to visualize multiple paths to a scientific enigma and specially to let himself be carried towards each of them is not common. Why is that? He claims to live in the future. And perhaps also because Michael Doser has been exploring what we do not see, but which exists, the antimatter. Every day, he works to measure the gravitational interaction between it and matter. And some very promising leads are finally emerging.  In an exclusive interview, Michael Doser shares his vision of what art and science can generate.

Can you tell us how the CERN art and science program came about?