The Language Exchange

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BBC Radio 4 LW

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Meetings between poets and scientists who share language and ideas and create new work.

The Language Exchange is a place where poets and scientists meet to share language and ideas and create new work.

The Language Exchange is a place where poets and scientists meet to share ideas and create new work. In each episode a poet will sit down with a scientist to find out more about a specific piece of research. The poet will then write a brand new poem inspired by their discussion.

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The Language Exchange: Fiona Sampson and Tara Shears

Fiona Sampson and Tara Shears

BBC Radio 4 - The Language Exchange, Fiona Sampson and Tara Shears

Poet Fiona Sampson meets physicist Professor Tara Shears to write a poem about antimatter.

The poet Fiona Sampson travels to CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to talk antimatter with Professor Tara Shears - and to create a new work inspired by her research.

Could sharing the insights of poets and scientists provide us with new insights into the big questions ?
Professor Tara Shears is investigating a mystery at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. If particles of matter have an antimatter counterpart - where precisely is all that antimatter? Where has it gone?
The answer could give us an insight into the very origins of the universe. 
Fiona Sampson is an award-winning poet who is tasked with interrogating the language of top quarks, bottom quarks or beauty quarks and the myriad of repurposed words which physicists use to communicate. 
In a trade off of perspectives and insights, Fiona will take this raw material of language and reinterpret it with a new work to be performed for Tara at the end of the project. 
It's a collision of poetry and science which makes us consider how we communicate and explore the surprisingly thin boundary between imagination, theoretical science and art. 
The music featured is "Sister" by Ulla Straus. 

Presented by Fiona Sampson. 
Produced by Kevin Core.

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