A hands-on exhibition owned by INFN (Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics), Microscopes of Physics will be hosted at the BA ALEXploratorium for three months starting from 6 August. The exhibition aims to explain what is known about the infinitely small and the infinitely large, using the instruments adopted by physicists to investigate the two worlds. The exhibition, organized in four showrooms, contains interactive exhibits and simulations that were particularly suitable for secondary schoolchildren, and a special area is set aside for inter-disciplinary applications of nuclear and sub-nuclear physics.
The first showroom is an introduction to the concepts of the infinitely small and the infinitely large through increasing enlargements, starting from the smallest particles at the heart of atoms up to the frontiers of the Universe.
In the second showroom, exhibits, videos and interactive games aim to reveal how particle accelerators function as well as the experimental techniques applied by scientists to explore the heart of matter and its fundamental constituents.
At the end of the room, thanks to 3D-projection, visitors can virtually enter into an accelerator to observe what happens inside and how scientists can observe the behavior of elementary particles.
The third showroom is dedicated to the connection between the studies on the infinitely small world and the critical phenomena occurring in the Universe, to finally understand the origin of everything.
Exhibits and short videos show how a deeper knowledge of the structure of matter helps us understand the Universe.
The fourth and last showroom is dedicated to some of the numerous technologies which have been developed for basic research and have been applied in apparently distant fields, from medical applications to heritage preservation.