Ophanim
or, How many angels can dance on a circuit board?

The OPHANIM sensor board from CERN’s AEgIS project is an absolute delight: A tongue-in-cheek throwback to the days when people cared about how scientific instruments looked, and used them to descry the occult mysteries of the universe.

You have heard of CERN, the European high-energy physics laboratory in Switzerland: the kind of place that invents the World Wide Web more or less as an afterthought. As every Dan Brown reader will know, they also make antimatter. The antiparticles that make up antimatter are oppositely charged twins to the normal kind. AEgIS (Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy), apparently, is one of several research projects looking at how antihydrogen is affected by gravity. This makes my mind itch, partly because I don’t see why antimatter wouldn’t fall the same way as matter, and partly because of the gratuitous acronym for an experiment with no obvious connection with the aegis, the protective shield or skin wielded by Zeus and Athena.

When a particle and an antiparticle meet, they are annihilated in a flash of energy. The pictured device was made to detect these minute sparks in real time. It’s a 3.8 gigapixel (!) imager called OPHANIM (Optical Photon and Antimatter Imager). Now there’s an acronym.

As you may suspect, Ophanim (אוֹפַנִּים ’ofannim) is also a Hebrew plural for the “wheels” of Ezekiel’s vision: wheels within wheels, or intersecting wheels, with a multitude of eyes along their rims, which makes them a fitting allusion for a device studded with 60 cell-phone camera sensors.

The Latin motto, too, refers to these silicon eyes: EX SAXIS HOMO FECIT OCULOS PER ARTEM INGENIUMQUE: “Man has made eyes from rock by skill and ingenuity.” It goes on to say: NUNC MONSTRUM USUM EST AD UNIVERSUM RESISCENDUM. With the help of my more Latin-savvy offspring, and assuming the last word is a typo for resciscendum, I make it out to mean: “Now this marvel [or: monster?] is used for learning about the universe.”

In his vision by the Kebar River, Ezekiel sees a whirlwind coming from the north, a cloud of fire with four “living creatures” inside it. Above the creatures was a throne on which sat “the appearance and a likeness of the glory of God”. The living creatures each had four wings and four faces: man, lion, ox, and eagle. They moved without turning, and fire and lightning flashed between them – high-energy physics indeed! Flanking them were the four eye-rimmed wheels-within-wheels:

When I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. The workmanship of the wheels looked like the gleam of beryl, and all four had the same likeness. Their workmanship looked like a wheel within a wheel. As they moved, they went in any of the four directions, without pivoting as they moved. Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around. So as the living creatures moved, the wheels moved beside them, and when the creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose.

Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, and the wheels would rise alongside them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. When the creatures moved, the wheels moved; when the creatures stood still, the wheels stood still; and when the creatures rose from the ground, the wheels rose alongside them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

(Ezekiel 1:15–21)

The vision has inspired prodigious speculation, from Jewish Merkabah (Chariot) mysticism predating the medieval Kabbalah, to the “Ancient Astronauts” crowd. The designers of the sensor board have embraced the symbolism. Beside the evocative acronym, the eye symbols, and the hocuspocus of Latin, the rim of the board features line drawings in blue and gold. Some of the figures just stand there in long robes with haloes around their heads; others appear to form an project presentation in the style of holy icons.

For example, two persons stand around a pedestal with a codex titled “MOU,” quills held ready to sign the memorandum of understanding for the project on behalf of their respective institutions, indicated by the buildings on each side (fig. 2). I’m afraid I can’t tell which buildings (is that the Technische Universität München clocktower on the right?).

There is also a medieval battle scene (fig. 3), with archers firing arrows at an opposing army and a circular target with the eye of the OPHANIM. The volley of arrows clearly represents the antihydrogen splitting into parallel beams as it passes through the gratings of the moiré deflectometer.

Another drawing is harder to interpret, but it takes us farther east then Ezekiel’s Babylon (fig. 4). Someone with rays shooting out of his halo appears to be seated in the lotus position, with something three-tipped in his lap. The Buddha? With the Three Jewels? To the seated figure’s right (our left) is a row of diminishing circles with dots; to their left, an approaching figure with what looks like a tail and pointy ears. A crossing line suggests that the caudate creature is either wielding a staff of some kind, or is passed by a beam.

Tail, staff, and Buddha might suggest the figure is Sun Wukong, the super-powered monkey king of Chinese epic. Or is it the Hindu god Hanuman? If so, is the seated sage Rama? It could be Shiva, too; CERN already has a statue of Shiva in a different pose (fig. 5), a gift from India, a country also involved in AEgIS. But if it’s Shiva, what is his trident doing in his lap?

I’m also not sure what the imagery represents. A part of the experimental setup that provides the antimatter, I think, but which part exactly? The circles could be the magnetic hoops of a particle accelerator, receding in perspective, with the dots representing antiprotons. But they have orbital as well as central dots (positrons and antiproton nuclei?). Antihydrogen atoms, diminishing in energy as they’re slowed and cooled? If so, the rays of light from the halo might be the laser cooling system, stilling the positrons like the seated sage is stilling his mind … On the other hand, the line crossing the monkey figure seems to end in a circle segment, so maybe it isn’t a staff, but a beam being fed into a ring. If so, the ring could be the Antiproton Decelerator, the row of circles would be the Proton Synchrotron, and the seated sage, I guess, would be the block of metal into which the energetic protons are fired, the collisions throwing off antiprotons in various directions like the rays of the halo. The figure monkeying around with them would then be trapping them into the decelerator to be slowed, cooled, and combined with positronium to form antihydrogen.

Anyway, this picture just fills me with nerdy joy (hat tip to @jaseg for posting it). In an age of ugly, stripped-down functionalism in tech, it harks back to an era of artisanal scientific instruments crafted for looks as well as for function, and it winks at an even remoter era before the natural and occult sciences had parted ways completely, when the “mysteries” of the universe were of a piece with the Mysteries. I love the light-hearted whimsy with which these serious matters of science and religion are treated, and the seriousness with which said whimsy has been engraved into a cutting-edge device on a board the size of a small breakfast plate. If any of this is my tax euros at work, they’ve been well spent.

Do you have a clue to the mysterious icons? Tell me in the comments!