Particle Fever --A Thrilling New Documentary About the Search for the Higgs Boson Mark Levinson’s thrilling new documentary “Particle Fever,” which depicts the 2012 discovery of the fabled Higgs boson – the Holy Grail of particle physics, and makes the greatest scientific achievement of our new century come alive, and by making the theoretical and experimental frontiers of physics seem so profoundly urgent and cool. The film captures the collective worldwide excitement when the LHC comes online for the first time, and when two separate teams of researchers confirm the discovery of the previously unknown elementary particle with a mass between 125 and 127 giga-electron-volts. Most of us outside the discipline of physics, writes Andrew OHeir in a brilliant review of the documentary, can only understand the theoretical backdrop of the quest for the Higgs, and the debates and conundrums arising from its apparent discovery, in simplified or metaphorical terms. The existence of the boson is taken as evidence of the “Higgs field,” which breaks certain laws of symmetry that otherwise hold in the universe and permits various elementary particles to possess mass, ultimately making structures like atoms and stars, planets and ultimately organic life forms possible. Levinson swings back and forth, OHeir says, between the two interdependent realms of physics research, the theoretical and the experimental. Some theorists, he writes, lean toward the “multiverse” model – the anti-supersymmetrical idea that our universe is just one bubble of an infinity of bubbles and create breathtaking mathematical models that may shed light on the many unexplained mysteries of physical reality. But without experimental physicists like Fabiola Gianotti and Monica Dunford, who helped design, build and run the LHC — apparently the largest and most sophisticated machine ever built by human beings – their theoretical models could never be anything more than extremely well-informed speculation.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 16:57:37 +0000
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