Photography: Alastair Philip Wiper returns to the Large Hadron Collider

When you look at photos of massive machinery don’t you have an uncontrollable urge to just press ALL THE BUTTONS? Probably best not in this case, as it may trigger some kind of premature nuclear explosion. No idea how Alastair Philip Wiper controls his urges, but considering this project is the second time he’s travelled to Switzerland to photograph the European Organization for Nuclear Research, there must be something tempting him back.

So what did he learn on his second visit? “At the moment the Large Hadron Collider is shut down for maintenance and upgrade, which means that I got to go underground to photograph the ATLAS detector, one of the experiments that is analysing particle collisions, and one of the experiments involved in detecting the Higgs Boson particle. At 45m long, 25m in diameter, and weighing about 7000 tonnes, it is a beast.” Yep, definitely understood all of that. “I also visited magnet research facilities and a storage warehouse where we found, hidden away behind some crates, a full scale model of part of the ATLAS detector that was used for training.” And that too.Thanks Alastair, even though we’re confused about what these machines are, we can say for sure that the photographs of them are truly exciting.