Uncouth Reflections

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

If you’re as cynical as I am, you might get something out of this documentary, which is currently available on Netflix Instant. It chronicles the attempts of physicists associated with CERN to detect the Higgs-Boson, that pesky “god particle” you’ve been hearing about in the news and basically nowhere else. (I’m sure an enclave of hipsters somewhere had a Higgs-Boson party to celebrate the particle’s discovery, but, well, fuck them.)

Since the entire project centers on nerdy types zooming invisible whatchamacallits around a ring while intently watching computer monitors, the doc’s makers have to distract you with “human interest” content, graphics, and music. We see the scientists playing ping-pong, voicing embarrassing art observations, and jogging. (I was reminded of those awful biographical bits that are screened between events during telecasts of the Olympics.) A rivalry between theorists and experimentalists is mentioned and never expanded on. And when the experiment that finally detects the Higgs is performed, psychedelic graphics sprawl across the screen while Beethoven’s 9th booms on the soundtrack and a giant replica of the Higgs descends from the rafters so that midgets dressed as quarks can dance around it. Okay, I made up that bit about the midgets. Still, you get my point: There’s something weird about all of this. Something, I dunno . . . desperate.

Watching the movie made me sympathize with the folks who put it together. It’s hard, after all, to take a an invisible event that almost no one understands and present it as world changing. Not that the filmmakers don’t try. The development of the Large Hadron Collider and its detection of the Higgs, we’re told, is an accomplishment equivalent to man walking on the moon or the construction of the pyramids. But are these valid comparisons? I get the effort and mental horsepower necessary to achieve all of these things, and I’m not disputing the scientific importance of detecting the Higgs . . . but I think we can all agree that, where spectacle is concerned, the computer graph that serves as proof of the H-B doesn’t quite measure up to the pyramids. I’m not sure it measures up to your average sunset. And, where great human achievements are concerned, isn’t spectacle a big part of what the public responds to?

Besides, it’s not like particles haven’t been discovered before. Wikipedia has a nice list of them. When the Gluon was detected in 1979, did anyone compare it to the moon landing? Was there a media campaign designed to coax us into accepting the Gluon as proof of the indispensability of the scientific establishment? I’m guessing the answer to both questions is “no.” Nevertheless, here we are in the 2010s and everyone really wants us to love the Higgs-Boson. Why? Is it because this particular particle is more important than the others? Maybe. But I suspect it might also have something to do with the cost of the Collider and its experiments. We’re talking something on the order of 13 billion dollars — none of it, mind you, raised through government bake sales.

(Granted, that’s around a 20th of what it cost us to find Osama Bin-Laden, shoot him in the face, and then dump him in the ocean without proving it to anyone . . . but still.)

“Particle Fever” tackles the money issue with gusto. The filmmakers and a few talking heads scoff at the American public for not wanting to foot the bill for a Yank version of the Collider, and a Republican politician is shown loudly criticizing a plan that would have installed one of the mega-devices somewhere in Texas. While the politician is probably a dickhead (aren’t they all?), his argument didn’t seem all that bad to me. His take: Let the Europeans pay for it; we’ll invest in it later on, if and when there is some practical application for all this colliding. The film presents this as the worst kind of pigheadedness — as the epitome of anti-science. But I took it as a reasonable expression of practicality. Hey, scientist guys: What would the American public have gotten out of that deal?

(In case any of our American readers are feeling down about not being part of all this — take heart! You ended up footing some of the bill anyway.)

Some of that money is on display in “Particle Fever.” Though we aren’t shown much of the Collider — what’s up with that? —  we’re given a keen sense of the personnel involved. Scientists, presumably all of them well paid, are all over the place; they’re like those gray-suited English actors in “Star Wars,” the ones forever standing around twiddling knobs on the Death Star. As one Netflix reviewer writes, the documentary “pretty much confirmed my suspicion that CERN is primarily a welfare program for PhDs.” That’s surely unfair. Still, it gets at something. If these learned people weren’t involved in the Higgs project — and they weren’t in this documentary talking about themselves — what would they be doing? Teaching somewhere, I guess. Is it fair to assume the scientists’ anxiety regarding the acceptance of the Collider is connected to a healthy (and very understandable) concern for their own livelihoods? Maybe it’s not fair to assume that; I’m not sure. But since the movie studiously avoids getting into the science behind the discovery — that would detract from the PR message — that’s the kind of thing you’re left to wonder as you watch these folks walk around with clipboards and breathlessly intone some version of “science is awesome!”