Statue of Lord Shiva’s Nataraja Dance, at CERN.  Photo Credit: Kenneth Lu, Wikimedia Commons

One of the things I love about attending the World Science Festival is the way that the events often incorporate music and dance so that aspects of modern science that are difficult to conceptualize are also presented in a different form.  For example, a while ago the WSF featured a lecture about dark matter which included an enthralling dance by the troupe MOMIX.  Their dances often draw on the natural world for inspiration in their costumes and choreography, such as the elements of air and water, or flora and fauna.  At WSF the dancers wore costumes that were designed so that under ultraviolet lighting only their limbs would be illuminated in a neon glow while the rest of their bodies remained dark and unseen.  Their dancing provided a visual demonstration for a concept that is true of dark matter– that we can get clues about what we can’t see from the effect it has on what we can see (we can infer information about dark matter from the effect it has on the acceleration of the expanding universe, just like we can infer the presence of invisible bodies from the observed movements of the dancers’ arms and legs).  Here is a sample of some of the other types of dances that MOMIX performs:

And here’s a particularly beautiful dance of theirs– in my mind it conjures up many types of imagery, such as fertility goddess iconography, the allusion to Mother Earth, and the invocation of Botticelli’s painting “The Birth of Venus.”

Watching MOMIX dancing the natural rhythms of the universe, I am reminded of how physicists have often drawn a comparison of the interactions of subatomic particles as a “cosmic dance.”  Perhaps this is why it is so apt that there is a statue of Lord Shiva at CERN– Lord Shiva is seen dancing the cosmic dance which both creates and destroys the universe, destroyed so that it can be recreated, so that there is a dynamic interplay between cycles of birth, death, and rebirth.  It is no wonder that Carl Sagan noted that among all the ways to envision divine interactions, “the most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva.”  This lets us experience the universe differently– it can be thought of as an ongoing process, more like a verb than a noun, an action rather than a thing– the universe is moving, dancing.