Tuesday, September 16, 2014

The romance of physics

I recently streamed from Netflix (Amazon Video offers it, too) the 2013 science documentary Particle Fever. It's foremost about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), decades in the making, arguably the largest and most complex machine ever constructed by mankind. The movie is also about the long hunt for the elusive Higgs boson and the wondrous things that this elementary particle's discovery (and its specific properties, once fully characterized) might portend.

Literally awe inspiring
It's about the Standard Model of Particle Physics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, and the even deeper insight(s) that might yet surpass it. It's also about conditions the briefest instant after the Big Bang, and -- at quite the opposite extreme -- about what the observed properties of the Higgs boson might imply about the end of the universe. And it's about whether even to speak of the universe is a misunderstanding, that (perhaps) we live, unknowingly, within a multiverse.

But beyond all these -- surely significant enough -- topics, Particle Fever is about the very human reasons why some of the brightest minds on the planet do physics. 

Along the way, the movie also reminds us that the worldwide web was invented at CERN (in English, the European Organization for Nuclear Research; the parent organization of the LHC). That wasn't so we could do Twitter and Facebook. No, the WWW was created so that thousands of scientists, on every continent, could share petabytes of LHC data in pursuit of truly astounding insights.

Can a general audience "get" Particle Fever? Mostly. Will you get more out of the movie with some background in modern physics? Undoubtedly.

In a world that all too often seems to be coming unglued, where the basest aspects of human nature are all too openly on display, how wonderful it is to be reminded of the soaring heights to which humans minds can aspire.

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