Paul Dirac lectures at CERN

When a group of physicists entered the Main Auditorium, during the evening of 29 June, they felt they had opened a time portal.

 

An attentive audience, dressed in early 1900 costumes, were watching a lecture by the elusive Paul Dirac, presenting for the first time his famous formula on the blackboard. Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984) was a British mathematical physicist at Cambridge, and one of the "fathers" of quantum mechanics. When he first wrote it, in 1928, Dirac was not sure what his formula really meant. As demonstrated by Andersson four year later, what Dirac had written on the blackboard was the first definition of a positron, hence he is credited with having anticipated the existence of antimatter.

What the group of puzzled physicists were really observing when they entered the CERN Auditorium was the shooting of a historical reconstruction produced for an institutional film on the LHCb experiment. Actor John Kohl, whose resemblance to the Father of antimatter is astounding, gave us an impressive interpretation of Dirac in the CERN Auditorium, transformed for the occasion into a hall at Cambridge University as it looked in the 20's. In real life John is a psychologist working for the University of Geneva, and for the purpose of the shooting he lectured our video team, and a group of summer students dressed as their grandfathers, on the psychology... of physics!


See the video here.

Dirac et sa formule devant le tableau noir.
©Sandra Hoogeboom

L'acteur John Kohl sous les traits de Paul Dirac.
©Sandra Hoogeboom