Hacker Cinema
Particle Fever
2013 · Film · documentary · 99 min
Directed by Mark Levinson
As the Large Hadron Collider is about to be launched for the first time, physicists are on the cusp of the greatest scientific discovery of all time - or perhaps their greatest failure.
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15 comments on Hacker News
Actually, your comment is a troll. I suggest that you watch Particle Fever, a beautiful documentary about the LHC. If you have already seen it, watch it again with an open mind.
No particular order:
- Particle fever
- Sugar Coated
- The United States of Secrets (and anything Frontline)
- Citizen Four and related movie drama, name escapes me now.
- Cosmos (new and old)
- The Social Dillema
- WWII in HD, two docs on Netflix both good.
- Ken Burns *
PBS Nova and Frontline often have their latest episodes on Youtube, they go more in depth than commercial documentaries. "Boeing's Fatal Flaw" in a great example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXMO0bhPhCw
Georgia Tech professor Aaron Lanterman has class lectures on music synthesis, electric guitars amps and effects, and general electronics: https://www.youtube.com/c/Lantertronics
Documentaries Particle Fever CERN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Lx109jdGCc
Slingshot, Dean Kamen - has the origin of FIRST Robotics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AsJXjK0CSo
Your proposal has merit. Perhaps Copilot is a necessary step towards this goal. I'm reminded of something physicist Savas Dimopoulos said in the documentary Particle Fever:
“The thing that differentiates scientists is purely an artistic ability to discern what is a good idea, what is a beautiful idea, what is worth spending time on, and most importantly, what is a problem that is sufficiently interesting, yet sufficiently difficult, that it hasn’t yet been solved, but the time for solving it has come now.”
Nima Arkani-Hamed was one of three theoretical physicists featured in the wonderful 2013 documentary "Particle Fever".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_Fever
There is actually: filmmaker Mark Levinson is at work on a biopic about Claude Shannon, due out next year! He did an award-winning documentary a few years back called "Particle Fever," which was about CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. High hopes for his upcoming one on Shannon!
"Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the big secret to success."
I don't know the source of this quote, but it was repeated by a physicist in the documentary "Particle Fever".
Nobody can figure out a way to test string theory.
Sure they can. Build a particle accelerator with one million times the power of LHC. Not knowing and not having the technology are two different things.
Fifty years ago nobody knew how to test the Higgs boson theory either. That didn’t stop them from moving on and when the technology permitted it run the tests and solidify the hypothesis. String theory didn’t just popped out of the heads of physicists who had nothing better to do with their time. Parts of string theory are already tested, the discovery of the new particle that was semi announced last week at LHC was predicted by a model of string theory. That’s how science progresses, with little steps. So don’t get pessimistic, scientists have done huge progress in the last hundred years or so.
Lastly, let’s not forget how little funding science gets these days and how many different areas they have to cover. It’s not just physics, you have cosmology, space exploration, biology, energy, just to name a few.
It’s not science’s job to answer philosophical questions. If for example philosophers feel powerless because of the multiverse theory we should stop theorizing it? If it turns out that life and everything we know is just the result of a mere stroke of luck, one universe with the proper conditions popping out from a variety of trillions, what should science do about it?
All those smart people hate to face the fact that what they're doing may be total bullshit.
It’s funny saying something like that in Hacker News. Everything each and every one of us does has the potential to turn out as total bullshit. Every single day we write code that turns to be total garbage. And yet we’re doing it. You should watch the “Particle Fever” documentary. There you’ll see the reactions of physicists who favor supersymmetry in the possibility that it proves wrong. Everyone is devastated but they accept it. It’s part of the job. You make it sound like these guys are disillusioned. Scientists know perfectly well the consequences of following a wrong path in their career but they do it either way and we should be grateful to them, not despise them for it.
I'm pretty sure Nima was featured in the fantastic documentary Particle Fever ( http://particlefever.com/ )
There are some interesting politics behind the Higgs boson results mentioned in the article. The 144GeV result should not have been released because it was not significant by particle physics standards (>5 standard deviations). However, the world was frothing at the mouth for LHC news, so out it went
There's a great documentary on Netflix about it called Particle Fever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_Fever
This is awesome!
I highly recommend 'Particle Fever', in case you haven't seen it yet. It cover's the LHC before the shutdown and restart, which included the Higgs boson discovery. Just fascinating look into what an international collaboration of human beings can accomplish.
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1385956/
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rikc7foqvRI
Netflix: http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70296323?trkid=13752289
Even if you aren't necessarily into Physics there is a great documentary called "Particle Fever" (also on Netflix) which has documented the Higgs particle discovery and the general purpose of the LHC.
A bit off-topic, but I was recently recommended the documentary "Particle Fever" by someone here on HN. I can now highly, highly recommend it as well. Really puts this whole thing in perspective!
I highly recommend folks watch Particle Fever (for a variety of reasons, and it's on Netflix), but one section particularly stuck out, when the documentary addresses the original LHC location in Texas being de-funded. It shows members of congress arguing how "discovering the origins of the universe" should not be a priority.
I think it's easy to make a very public argument against budgeting research, as the general public doesn't necessarily understand the larger implications of these experiments (at a cursory glance, I rarely see it myself, but I generally give research the benefit of the doubt). Particle Fever addresses this point blank with the discovery of Radio Waves, how nobody really knew what this discovery meant until years/decades later when it became a massive step forward in communication.
My dad is a bit old fashioned, and if you told him in a soundbite that congress was spending money on shrimp treadmills, with no other context he'd immediately make his snap judgement that the government is once again wasting his money. Hard thing to overcome, no matter how important the research might end up being.
Thanks for your post and link. I recently watched Particle Fever on Netflix and became extremely fascinated with the field. A lot of the information you posted is touched on in the documentary. It is mostly focused around CERN and the years leading up to the Higgs particle discovery. There are also great interviews with David Kaplan and Nima Arkani-Hamed.
You've likely seen it but if not you might enjoy it.