Brian Cox was the first subject/victim whose research I chose to try and depict as a wallpaper design. Professor Brian Cox has done some of his research work at the Large Hadron collider, that very large circular tunnel under the ground in Switzerland where they accelerate atoms, or bits of atoms very fast in opposite directions and then smash them together to see what smaller bits might fly off. It is the science of the very tiny and the very hard to observe.

With my wallpaper I decided to start very very simple; well things do get pretty complicated pretty quickly in this area. The particular detector that Brian has used in his work to try and observe the bits flying off from the collisions is called the ATLAS detector and it is an octagon shape. This octagon wraps right round the tunnel of the hadron collider so it will ‘see’ anything flying off no matter what direction it goes. So far so good. One of the ways that the research team can work out anything about the atom fragments is from their flight path as they zoom through a strong magnetic field. Bend one way it means something, bend further another way, it means something else etc. As a wallpaper designer I was enjoying the beautiful curves so they had to go in.

Now things got a bit tougher. The research work that Brian does, as far as I can work out, is as a very clever maths bean. The lecture I listened to several times, is all about how there is a very very weirdly useful, almost all knowing equation that kind of explains almost everything about different kinds of matter (it is called the standard model). Yes you read this right, one equation. It looks pretty complicated to me, but to the maths brains of this world it is apparently very simple and a very beautiful, and pretty insane that it exists at all.

Now what exactly has Brian done? Well I’m still not sure, but he does seem very enthusiastic about manipulating equations. He says, ‘If you find something you can do to an equation that leaves that equation unchanged then we know that that relates to some symmetry of nature. It seems like a completely random thing to do, turns out though it is not random. It is a profoundly interesting and important thing to do’. Well great I thought, he loves a bit of symmetry, something that can be twizzled round, flipped over or mathematically put through the tumble dryer yet emerged unchanged, I shall give him such a wallpaper. So the repeat pattern I have concocted is vertically symmetrical, horizontally symmetrical and therefore rotationally symmetrical in that you can spin parts around and there are four places you could stop and no-one could tell you’d done anything.

Finally I used a jolly pink palette mostly because I was enjoying it, but also because I see it as being joyful and exuberant as Brian certainly is.

Source: Public talk at CERN June 2013: An introduction to particle physics.