Mission
In Search of a Smoother Pebble
In his famous 1959 essay “The Two Cultures”, C.P. Snow observed that “There seems … to be no place where the cultures meet.” Snow was referring to the two cultures of the sciences and the literary arts, but he could just as well have been speaking of arts more broadly. The mission of Smoother Pebble is to create places where the two cultures can meet; where one illuminates the other through multiple artistic paths that delight, educate, and inspire. Smoother Pebble is a collaboration between artists, scientists, the local community, and the art@CMS program of Michael Hoch at CERN and other scientists at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The five-year project of artistic works, loosely guided by a different scientific theme each year, will end with the centennial of the foundational 1925 paper by Werner Heisenberg, heralding the new quantum theory. In 2025, Smoother Pebble is expected to contribute to a worldwide celebration, through artistic interpretations, of this seismic shift in our understanding of the physical world.
This project began as an Art/Science collaboration between the Departments of Art and Physics at Florida State University. It has grown to encompass faculty from Tallahassee Community College, the School of Dance at FSU and other organisations in the city. The title of our project is In Search of a Smoother Pebble.