CERN has done a heckuva job in raising public awareness of the Large Hadron Collider; I'd argue that it's currently the most recognizable experimental physics facility in the world. Granted, most people know it as "that big machine that could destroy the world as we know it," but in terms of sheer name recognition, the LHC is a bona fide celebrity.
So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that one of its detectors, ATLAS, is the inspiration for a mural artist in South Carolina named Josef Kristofoletti. Back in 2008, when the LHC first fired up (and almost immediately shut down for repairs), he created a mural of ATLAS on the wall of the Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston. He may be an artist, but Kristofoletti is a lifelong science fan, ever since he fell in love with physics thanks to an introductory class in college.
He told Symmetry Breaking that he got the idea from the murals of the Renaissance. "The subject of most of those works is religious mythology. When I think about the LHC it always seems like an unprecedented cathedral of science. I thought this would be a modern-day version of a Renaissance mural," he said. (A policeman who stopped to question Kristofoletti's work-in-progress engaged in a lengthy discussion of potential doomsday scenarios.) The work caught CERN's attention, too, and Kristofoletti was invited to tour the real thing, much to his delight.
Symmetry Breaking has kept tabs on Kristofoletti since then. The artist is now painting an enormous mural to represent the ATLAS detector at the LHC. How big? It will be almost full-scale, roughly 2/3 the size of the real ATLAS, which is 46 meters long and 25 meters high. He had to learn how to paint from a cherry pick, and he didn't quite finish the job before Geneva's winter chill set in; he'll resume the painting this spring.
In the meantime, he's not the only person to be artistically inspired by the LHC. You knew it had to happen eventually: an entire Website merging the LHC with LOLcats.
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