A documentary film on the discovery of the Higgs boson, which promises to capture the excitement of scientific research on an unprecedented scale using the world's largest machine, opens tonight in New York.
At a press briefing at Google's New York headquarters, David Bradley, a theoretical physicist who participated in the discovery and helped make the film, called Particle Fever, said that despite knowing what was likely to happen when scientists turned on the Large Hadron Collider, he was surprised by his reaction to the discovery.
"Now we've seen the Higgs," he said. "I felt much more emotional about that than I expected to." Nima Arkani-Hamed, another theorist who stars in the film, said of the Higgs boson, "We've never seen anything like it before anywhere in physics." Fabiola Gianotti, one of the key experimental physicists on the project, said the search for the Higgs, the 17th fundamental particle, was personal. "I consider the Higgs a new friend. I want to get to know it."
I haven't seen the film, but based on the clips we saw this morning, you can expect to hear many more of those kinds of personal, inspiring, and slightly cryptic comments from the physicists in the film, who did an excellent job this morning of kindling interest in their work.
The scientists noted that it has been half a century since the possible existence of the Higgs boson was first proposed, and it was not until July 4, 2012 that its discovery was announced. The Higgs boson was "the simplest solution to a very complicated problem," Arkani-Hamed said. "Many people started getting cold feet and thought it wasn't there." And when it was discovered, physicists found themselves with a new mystery, he said. "It should be fluctuating wildly, but it isn't. And we don't know why."
The next round of experiments at the LHC, which is now shut down but will be restarted next year, could help to answer that question, he said.
Dennis Overbye at The New York Times wrote a nice piece on the film on Feb. 24, and many others have written about it as well. It opens tonight at the Film Forum in Greenwich Village, and in the next few days in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, and, yes, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which must be where one of the scientists' mothers lives; I don't know how else to explain it.
Like the physicists who were excited about the Higgs boson before they'd seen it, I'm excited about this film, which I haven't yet discovered. I suspect, like the Higgs boson, it will hold some nice surprises.
-Paul Raeburn
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