Particle Fever

Particle Fever is a lovely little documentary about the work of bringing CERN's Large Hadron Collider on-line. The point-of-view bounces back and forth between the theoreticians at Hopkins and Princeton and Stanford, and the experimentalists up to their hips in hardware at CERN outside of Geneva. We get to see the ups-and-downs of bringing the LHC beam on-line and the failure of super-conducting magnets that cause a delay in bringing the LHC to full power. At the climax, we get to see the seminar in which the two interlocking experiments searching for the Higgs boson present their results, both seeing the same energy peak. During that seminar, as the second team announces the confirming results, the filmmakers turn their camera to the audience breaking into applause and a shot of Peter Higgs, dabbing at the corners of his eyes with his handkerchief.

        One of the things that's only touched on here is one of the eternal struggles in scientific research, the struggle for funding. The question from those in Congress who ask, "what good is it? will it help us make better weapons? why should I spend money on this rather than on tax cuts, social programs, the war on drugs?" The answer is never easy, but it's pretty simple:

        The reason for doing basic scientific research is to understand our world. Learning things is what makes us human. Finding the Higgs boson is what we want to know next. To the reluctant Congressmen, I'd add, this is what makes America great: asking a big question, striving to find out something new, to bring new knowledge to light. It's things like this that bring students to our shores. The answers are ones that won't bear economic fruit tomorrow, or the next day, and perhaps not even directly, but they will make us richer both in spirit and in means.