The ‘Large Hadron Collider’ is the most powerful accelerator in the world, boosting particles such as protons at a speed nearly as fast as the speed of light, forcing collisions between protons to (very briefly) create ‘massive particles’, some of which existed in the early days of the universe. The amount of energy generated in the collision transforms the particles into new particles, which then decay into lighter particles, with those decaying and so on. Scientists use these observations to better our understanding of matter and the creation of the universe.
Accelerators use electromagnetic fields to contain the particles and guide their trajectory, which is often a spin of many cycles before they hit each other.
I see this process and everything involved in it as an apt metaphor for what I am trying to communicate – two entities (the global self of society and the individual self) spinning in countless cycles in unison towards each other. The collision, for me, evokes a point of realisation that you cannot be who you are without the environment that you are in (referring to the ideology of the Tabula Rasa, a blank slate) and the place you are in is completely constructed by your perspective of it; we only see things through our own lens. It is a feedback loop of place informing self perception and self perception informing place – the awareness of this is the only way, I feel, to begin reformatting your self perception and creating something new, both internally and externally.
This diagram shows a cross section of a dipole within a large hadron collider. To push the metaphor further, the first thing I saw when looking at this image was an abstract cybernetic face, which is encased within two circles. This supports my idea of a hadron collider mirroring the realisation of self within the chaos of modern living, as the inside of the collider which I am using to anchor my metaphor literally looks like the facial anatomy of a cybernetic being, at least to me it does.