CERN Art and Science Summit

A century ago, quantum mechanics overturned everything physicists thought they understood about the nature of reality. Particles occupy multiple states simultaneously; observation changes what is observed; uncertainty is not a limitation of measurement but a fundamental property of the world. The CERN Art and Science Summit 2025, themed Uncertainty, gathered artists, scientists, poets, and philosophers at CERN's Science Gateway in Geneva to ask what this upheaval still means — for physics, for culture, and for the imagination. The summit was held as part of UNESCO's International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, marking a century since the foundational discoveries were made.

Honor's talk, "But Also Needed Is Imagination: Art and the Very Strange Patterns of Quantum Mechanics," argued that art is not merely a response to scientific discovery but part of the same imaginative process that makes discovery possible. Drawing on exhibitions including All Possible Paths: Richard Feynman's Curious Life and Collider, she explored how artists have found in quantum physics not just subject matter but a different kind of permission: to inhabit contradiction, to hold multiple truths at once, to resist the pressure to resolve what cannot yet be resolved.

The summit was curated by Mónica Bello of Arts at CERN, and brought together a remarkable range of voices: the theoretical physicist Luis Álvarez-Gaumé, the poet Holly Corfield Carr, Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs Media Collective, Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism, and the musician and artist Maria Arnal. Together they tested the boundaries of what uncertainty might mean not just as a scientific principle, but as a way of being in the world.