Hikaru Utada Would Rather Play CERN Than Coachella

Schrödinger’s cat, quantum entanglement—the songs on Hikaru Utada’s latest album, Science Fiction, go deeper into the singer-songwriter’s “fascination with science” than they ever have before. Part greatest-hits collection, part reflection on interests they have cultivated for many years, it’s a body of work that shows their breadth as an artist. It only seemed fitting, then, that WIRED Japan would invite Utada to Switzerland to visit CERN, one of the world’s leading research centers for particle physics, an invitation they quickly accepted.

“CERN is a place I have dreamed of visiting for the past 10 years or so,” Utada says. “To be honest, being able to go there and talk to the scientists and see the particle accelerator might be even better than performing on the main stage at Coachella [laughs]. I definitely wanted to go.”

CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, located on the border between Switzerland and France. Its iconic Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—a gigantic circular accelerator with a circumference of 27 kilometers—made its name in 2012 when it discovered the Higgs boson, the mysterious particle that continues to play a key role in experiments into the origins of the universe.

The center’s work is not limited to research about how the universe began and the behavior of subatomic particles; it can also lead to advances that have greater impacts on everyday life. For example, in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist who was then working at CERN, developed a system to provide decentralized, real-time access to information within the organization. It became the foundation for the World Wide Web.

In recent years, the organization has also been proactively engaged in outreach efforts that fuse art and science. That’s why University of Tokyo physicist Junichi Tanaka and Kazuki Kojima, a researcher at KEK (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization) are here. CERN asked the Japanese scientists to accompany Utada and WIRED on our CERN visit. Utada asked the two of them more questions than anyone else. While standing in front of ATLAS (the large general-purpose particle detector located 100 meters under the main CERN campus that detects and measures particles accelerated and collided by the LHC), the conversation around the topic of dark matter was a lively one.

Utada: What are you most focused on pursuing at the moment?

Kojima: There is a theory in particle physics called the Standard Model, but it can only explain about 5 percent of the mass and energy in the universe. In fact, it is thought that about 26 percent of the mass and energy in the universe is dark matter, and the remaining 70 percent is dark energy. Regardless of dark energy, we know that dark matter exists, but we don't know what it is, and we are currently searching to understand its true nature.

Utada: Dark energy is …

Kojima: We know almost nothing about it.

Tanaka: You could say it’s a name that was almost given at random.

Utada: OK, so “dark” here doesn’t mean “not lit,” but rather “unknowable” or “unknown.”

Tanaka: We don’t know anything about dark energy. It has that name because the universe is expanding. But dark matter can be explained by gravity, so we believe it exists. But it’s hard to find it. We’re trying to measure something when we don't know what it is, so we spend a great deal of time conducting experiments.

Utada: It’s like proving the existence of something by the absence of something else.

Kojima: Yes, that’s right.

Utada: It’s like trying to prove the existence of an invisible man. A room with capacity for 10 people is packed even though there are only nine people there. Or there were 10 people in the room, but traces of 11 people coming from it.

Tanaka Yes, yes, that’s the idea!

It’s a matter of making an analogy to something else or replacing one relationship with another. Utada says they attach a special importance to this act. This means that they regularly transform what exists only in their own mind into clever metaphors by making full use of the knowledge and experience they have cultivated over time, and the words and symbols derived from their intuition. They then diligently carry out the task of communicating these to others.

“When I compared dark matter to an invisible man, I was really happy to hear Tanaka and Kojima say, ‘Oh, that's right!’” Utada says.

Another thing that made an impression on Utada was the pair’s response to their question about what they’d want to convey to the general public who are not experts in science. “Tanaka thought for a while and then said, ‘I guess it would be that there is still so much we don’t know.’ I thought that was really wonderful,” Utada says.

But it’s even deeper than that. “I think the ‘knowledge of ignorance,’ feeling truly excited by the fact that there are things we don’t yet know or don’t understand, is a very important perspective,” Utada says. “Fear comes from ignorance, doesn’t it? It is human instinct to fear the dark. It’s because we don’t know that we feel fear, discrimination, prejudice, violence, and more. So what is the opposite of that? I think it’s curiosity and a spirit of inquiry.”

This story is an excerpt of a piece from WIRED Japan's Quantumpedia March issue.

Special thanks to: Presence Switzerland (Federal Department of Foreign Affairs), embassy of Switzerland in Japan, Switzerland tourism, CERN, Geneva tourism, hotel president Wilson Junichi Tanaka (The University of Tokyo), Kazuki Kojima (KEK), Masato Aoki (KEK), Tomoyuki Saito (The University of Tokyo), Nozomu Kaji (Sony Music Labels, Inc.), Mina Okachi (Sony Music Labels, Inc.), Akihico Mori styling by Kyohei Ogawa, hair and makeup by Hisano Komine, project coordination by Erina Anscomb.