DVine

The ‘Booze On’ or ‘God Party Cool’ 

«In Vino Veritas»
(«All the best ideas are born in pubs»)

1973

mixed technique 95x63 cm (ideally 7 mt high wine container)

Dedicated to “Max Plonck” and Peter Higgs

Since ancient Greek times wine has been associated with divinity, with the god Dionysus presiding over the banquet. This piece, made in 1973, postulates that we might find in wine (‘in vino veritas’) that divine particle the Higgs boson (which has since been discovered in July 2012).

The Higgs boson was nicknamed ‘the God Particle’ by Nobel prize-winning physicist Leon M Lederman in his eponymous book of 1993, because it is ‘so central to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive.’ He adds that a second reason was because ‘the publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title’ given the difficulty in finding it.

Wine and truth, or alcohol and science, are also in some way linked to the discovery of DNA. After all, in 1953 before publishing their findings in a scientific paper, Francis Crick burst into the Eagle pub in Cambridge where university scientists were carousing,
to announce that he and James Watson had ‘found the secret of life’.

D-Vine is dedicated to Max Planck, German physicist, founder of quantum theory (whose name here is a play on the colloquial ‘plonk’ - a wine to be glugged, rather than savoured) and Peter Higgs, the English physicist, who explained the origin of the Wand Z bosons, and who (amongst others!) postulated the existence of the Higgs boson named after him (his surname becomesHick, as in ‘hiccups’).

The background in the picture is grass green : ‘Higgs’s Field’