Movie: Particle Fever

Documentary on the creation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the search for the Higgs boson.  With such a huge undertaking of course it was necessary to focus on only a few personalities, a few events and a few results to make a comprehensible documentary.  The movie begins in 2005 during final construction of the LHC and ends in mid-2012 with the confirmation of the Higgs.

What was interesting is that there are two competing theories that gave two different possible values for the Higgs.  Supersymmetry predicted a value of 115 GEV and the multiverse theory predicted 140 GEV.

What CERN found, in April 2012, was a value of 125 GEV.  Peter Higgs was in the audience to witness it.

Both sides were disappointed, both theories were thrown into doubt, more research is necessary to understand the result.  The LHC was only operating at half power so perhaps at higher power different results will come out.  The higher energy level tests commenced last month, June 2015.

This documentary had some very big names behind it -- Mark Levinson directed it, and Walter Murch edited it.  The graphics were stunning -- even though no attempt was really made to explain the physics.

Quote :

In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson with no spin, electric charge, or colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. It is a quantum excitation of one of the four components of the Higgs field. The latter constitutes a scalar field, with two neutral and two electrically charged components, and forms a complex doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry. The Higgs field is tachyonic (this does not refer to faster-than-light speeds, it means that symmetry-breaking through condensation of a particle must occur under certain conditions), and has a "Mexican hat" shaped potential with nonzero strength everywhere (including otherwise empty space), which in its vacuum state breaks the weak isospin symmetry of the electroweak interaction. When this happens, three components of the Higgs field are "absorbed" by the SU(2) and U(1) gauge bosons (the "Higgs mechanism") to become the longitudinal components of the now-massive W and Z bosons of the weak force. The remaining electrically neutral component separately couples to other particles known as fermions (via Yukawa couplings), causing these to acquire mass as well. Some versions of the theory predict more than one kind of Higgs fields and bosons. Alternative "Higgsless" models would have been considered if the Higgs boson was not discovered.

I've been following the search for Higgs at CERN for some time. Fascinating project (the little I could understand). Watching the announcement when they found it, and seeing Higgs as he heard it, was quite moving.

To illustrate the dedication of the physicists, and others, who were working on it, here's a bit of trivia. I have a friend who does commentary for billiards tournaments for STAR TV (an Asian satellite business). A few years ago, at a tournament in Manila, one of the contestants was a man who worked at CERN. Jay told me that any time the guy wasn't at the pool table, he was on the bench hunkered over his laptop, working on the project, oblivious to all the tumult around him. So apparently, physicists have a life outside of research. Well, one of them anyway.

In one of the scenes, the female scientist they were following, Fabiola Gionotti (who of course is beautiful) is talking about the caliber of people at CERN. There is nobody average. There is nobody smart. There is nobody brilliant.

They are all certified geniuses.

All 40,000 of them.

Yes, even the janitor has an MBA (Master of Brooming Acumen).