BackParticle Fever: The Universe in 100 minutes
Why your teenage child should watch 'Particle Fever', a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider
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One afternoon some six years ago, I was sitting at home reading a book when our maid barged in and asked me, in a rather agitated tone, “Have you heard that the world is going to end in three days?"
The doomsday event that she was so worried about was the impending inauguration of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), and there were stories, some quite exaggerated, that it would create black holes and destroy the earth.
The LHC on the border of France and Switzerland is the largest machine ever built and the world’s most expensive scientific experiment. In the world of science, the LHC is a very big deal. It has been built to recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, the point when scientists believe the universe was born. The collider will enable scientists to test their theories, particularly the one about the Higgs boson—aka the “God particle"—whose existence was predicted some 50 years ago but for which there was no evidence.
The collider was switched on in the early hours of 10 September 2008—two days after our maid confronted me with her question. I am reminded of that moment because I recently saw Particle Fever, a gripping film about the LHC and the scientists’ endeavour to discover the Higgs (The New York Times newspaper has called it “mind-blowing").
The hour-and-a-half-long documentary film was shot over a period of seven years and chronicles every crucial stage in the progress of the experiment—from construction to trial run and the disaster that followed, and the eventual discovery of the elusive particle. The focus is not the machine, though it’s there with all its gigantic dimensions: Imagine a ringed Metro train tunnel, 27km long and 100m underground, that took 14 years to build and cost billions of dollars.
The focus of the film is the scientists and their theories. There is no narrator; the story is told through various scientists as they go about their work, discuss their theories. It’s all live; the story is told as it unfolds.
The director of the film, Mark Levinson, is a former physicist with a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. He knows what is at stake at the LHC, and understands the language of his key cast of six eminent physicists, through whom he tells the story of the hunt for the God particle.
Three of them are theoretical physicists and three experimentalists, and you can see that they have different perspectives. But you don’t need knowledge of physics to get a basic idea of their positions. It’s not important that you know the difference between a proton and neutron, a quark and an electron, or theories like supersymmetry and multiverse. You listen to them talk about the universe, and you realize this is what genius is all about.
The producer David Kaplan is a professor of theoretical particle physics at the US’ Johns Hopkins University, and is one of the six protagonists. And they commissioned Walter Murch (the legendary editor of Apocalypse Now and The English Patient), who turned the complex and heavy physics into a simple film. The result is a fantastic glimpse of a scientific breakthrough as it unfolds.
In the background is this machine that is going to test their theories. They are all working towards the day when the collider will be switched on. And then there will be a long wait before the data gets analysed. You feel the excitement; you wonder what’s going to happen.
And then, on 4 July 2012, Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN, tells a packed auditorium, “As a layman, I would say we have it." And I sat back in my chair, and said, “Wow! That was nice." In the audience you see Prof. (Peter) Higgs wiping a tear.
You enjoy the film even if you are not into physics. If you still think you don’t want to watch it, don’t. But please do tell your children in high school or college to see it. It’s truly inspiring: It covers the entire process of scientific research, besides unravelling the secrets of the universe. Sadly, at present it is not available in the DVD format; iTunes has it, but not on their India store. So you’ll have to ask friends to get it for you.
Shekhar Bhatia is a science buff and a geek at heart.
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