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“A lot of sound and light, signifying nothing.” That was The Guardian’s notoriously acerbic art critic Jonathan Jones’s by Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, whose installation Supersymmetry resulted from a stint as artist-in-residence at CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva.

Jones concluded that the array of beeps, whooshes, dazzling strobes and light pulses basically seems to be rubbing its head and groaning: “Blow me, this is complicated stuff.”

And what else should we expect when an artist unschooled in science comes face to face with cutting-edge physics? “Art and science, we feel, should…