Science in the Wild: Episode 16

Exploring messages for big science in the movie “Particle Fever”

Click here to listen to the interview on the UR Business Network

In this episode, Gary and Nathan review the movie documentary Particle Fever, directed by Mark Levinson, a physicist turned filmmaker, and edited by Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient).

“Particle Fever follows six brilliant scientists during the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, marking the start-up of the biggest and most expensive experiment in the history of the planet, pushing the edge of human innovation. As they seek to unravel the mysteries of the universe, 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries joined forces in pursuit of a single goal: to recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang and find the Higgs boson, potentially explaining the origin of all matter. But our heroes confront an even bigger challenge: have we reached our limit in understanding why we exist? …Particle Fever is a celebration of discovery, revealing the very human stories behind this epic machine.” (Extracted 24APR2014 from web site for Particle Fever)

We include this review in the corpus of content for Science in the Wild because it beautifully reveals the backstory of science. While the documentary is about an investigation of unprecedented size and scope, we believe it applies to the vast majority of everyday science.

The filmmakers distilled an unimaginably vast number of individual experiences and collegial relationships into a few representative stories that evolved from 2008 to 2012. The six main characters represented the large number and variety of people involved in the project, including theoretical physicists, experimental physicists, program managers and bench level scientists and engineers, the most senior to the most junior researchers, as well as women and men of different nationalities.

The movie shows that science is a deeply personal endeavor with frustration and anticipation that can drive participants to extremes of emotion in which rationality and irrationality collide in a dramatic mix. We actually witness the experiences and behavior of scientists as they are brought to the limits of their understanding and beyond, to the brink of existential threats to their intellectual lives and livelihoods, and to the humanity that surrounds their scientific personas and the attendant expertise. We see scientists as people with extraordinary expertise who nevertheless confront their needs and intellectual limitations in ways that are similar to most other human beings.

Particle Fever also showed the complicated relationship that science can have with the media. It is exceedingly rare for scientific investments and research to have the level of scrutiny of the Large Hadron Collider and the almost sports play-by-play coverage of the search for the Higgs particle. It is no less interesting, however, to see what it looks like to cover science as an activity as opposed to merely the results that such activities anticipate and eventually yield. Gary and Nathan speculated about the implications for a future of science journalism that involves such coverage of more quotidian science in action.

Gary and Nathan stressed the importance of the intellectual diversity, emotional commitments, and collective intelligence revealed in Particle Fever. We believe that science not only can survive the individual biases that follow from strident passion, it can thrive on it. Passion can guide reason and motivate innovation if we are mindful of our biases and allow ourselves to be challenged by other perspectives. A range of biases is better than trying to eliminate bias through stilted thinking or, worse, by inattention to biases that become more covert.

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Key Terms and Concepts

· Large Hadron collider
· Higgs boson
· Big Bang
· Theoretical physics
· Experimental physics
· Collective intelligence
· Emotional intelligence
· Passion and reason
· Citizen science
· Ontology
· Epistemology