Scaling up, and down
Breaking down heady scientific concepts is Lisa Randall’s specialty. The Harvard theoretical physicist, an authority on both the study of the minute, such as the building blocks of matter, and the massive, like the makeup of the universe, has written works that help to demystify the worlds of cosmology and particle physics. Now the dark-matter guru is illuminating science with art. In “Measure for Measure” a new exhibition at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Randall and eight Los Angeles-based artists dive into the artistic and scientific notion of scale. The concept is central to the role of the Large Hadron Collider (HLC), a mammoth ring of superconducting magnets buried underground on the French-Swiss border, whose goal is to unlock secrets of the universe by smashing together subatomic particles. Much of Randall’s own theoretical work involves the HLC. She describes the giant machine’s relationship to scale in her recently published “Knocking on Heaven’s...