The film itself is very accomplished -- very much in the style of the revamped Cosmos. While this makes it much easier to sit back and soak in some of the scientific concepts (or at least delude yourself into thinking that that is occurring*), some of the flashy graphics come close to overwhelming the concepts that they are trying to get across in the documentary. But the truth is that the actual concepts, to say nothing of the maths behind them, are so far beyond the average person as to make you feel inadequate. Then you watch a few brilliant scientists (who still are sort of not in the very top league) say that if the Higgs weighs 140 leptons, they've wasted their whole career. Kind of daunting.
I actually came relatively close to going into physics in college, but realized that I just didn't have the stuff to be in the top tier, i.e. one of the theorists, and decided to bail. Maybe I could have been satisfied as an experimentalist, but there is no question my timing was poor. I could easily have gotten stuck in the cancellation of the Texas Super Collider (briefly touched on in this film) and that would have felt even more like a whole lifetime wasted.
I don't know if it is really a SPOILER or not, but they are pretty sure that they did find the Higgs Boson and its weight is pretty close to 125 leptons, which has some peculiar properties (at least according to the physicists on the screen). I'll get back to the implications, as they related them, shortly.
At the end of the screening, I actually overheard a guy say he was disappointed how it turned out (the actual weight of the Boson) and that he wondered if it meant they would be doing a sequel to this film. And that's exactly why we need films like this (and the revamped Cosmos) to have flashy graphics, since so many people miss the point, even when it is spoon fed to them. I guess you can't really win. Some folks will assume that you can sit back and have a 90 minute documentary teach you the secrets of the universe, and are disappointed to find out otherwise. But if you don't at least try to reach out to the general public, through films like this, then there is no support at all for investing in basic science.
I actually felt a little bit better to learn later on that one of the David Kaplan, one of the main "talking heads" throughout was a producer of the film, so that this wasn't entirely organized and shot by outsiders. Still, they kept it fairly light, occasionally showing the theorists putting all kinds of higher-order math equations on blackboards, but never trying to walk through them, for instance. Anytime the concepts were discussed, such as what the Higgs Boson meant or how it interlocked with other particles, this was represented through graphics.
The focus was definitely on the quest itself and trying to portray the huge scale of the experiment. For instance, there was just a tiny glimpse into the naming of quarks and what their anti-matter counterparts were called, but then almost nothing on how quarks actually are thought to combine into protons and neutrons (but not electrons, which are actually leptons).
So this image represents what is known as the Standard Model. (All I can figure out is the e stands for electron in the green and that u is an up quark and d is a down quark -- I've forgotten all the rest.)
The Higgs Boson is in the very centre of it, but it hadn't been observed or weighed by the time Particle Fever started.
But even if the Higgs Boson was found, there are still some huge unanswered questions, many of them having to do with the relative weakness of gravity as a force, as well as the nature (and mass) of so-called dark matter. And this is the extended version of the model called Supersymmetry which tries to place dark matter (the tilda y particle) in a larger structure.
As I said, there is no question that it requires a huge leap to get to this point, and the film either assumes you have this knowledge or that you can cruise up at the higher level without worrying too much about the details. Now I haven't really investigated these resources, but here is a bit of a primer on the Standard Model and here is some discussion of Supersymmetry.
I personally would have added a few more minutes on quarks and the hunt for the neutrino, including perhaps some of the first neutrino detectors, as I think that would have shown how the experimentalists have been really supporting the theorists throughout. In other words, it wasn't just a 20 year wait for the LHC to come on-line. (Indeed, I wonder what if any bonus material will come on the DVD of Particle Fever. That might well sway me to purchase it if it has some more background material.)
Let me add a few things I found interesting about the film and then discuss some of the things (that, trust me, I do not pretend to actually understand) that were sort of glossed over or only hinted at in Particle Fever.
While there was quite a lot of happiness at the success of getting the first beam up and running, it was very quickly followed by a vacuum leak and liquid helium spill that shut down the LHC for several months as they had to fix the issue. One of the theorists said that it was a mistake to have such a huge press release before they actually had anything to report. They decided after the repairs to run the LHC at half-power to get some data, and then to shut the whole thing down to upgrade and get closer to full power. That is actually where things stand, and according to this schedule, it should be back up and running by the spring.
Somewhat chastened by this experience, the physicists wanted to do a few test collisions (literally in the middle of the night) and then invite the media the next morning. There was huge pushback, with the media relations people saying that there would be consequences to pay if the media were only invited to some early collisions and not the first ones. This viewpoint prevailed, though a number of physicists were really worried that this would be an unbelievable PR disaster if things went wrong. The tension, even on screen, was palpable. It is quite incredible that they got it exactly right, and even more of a surprise that, even at half energy, the results came through faster than expected.
It was another incredible moment in the film when they announced at a press conference that they had indeed found the Higgs Boson particle. Peter Higgs was actually there. While he had expected the particle he theorized would be found some day, it was all a bit touch and go whether it would be in his lifetime.
Anyway, as Kaplan attempts to explain, the weight of the Higgs Boson matters, for reasons that are far too esoteric to go into, because if the Higgs Boson is relatively light (115 leptons) then it suggests Supersymmetry is largely correct and there are a number of other particles out there still to discover. If it is heavy (around 140 leptons) then we might be in a pocket of the multiverse where the local conditions are such that we get a seemingly stable universe with all the particles in the Standard Theory, but there might not be anything more to discover (certainly not any new particles). It basically asserts that the universe is completely random and it is just our luck to be in a pocket where matter could form. It is a bit nihilistic and basically rejects the notion that there is any unifying theory, and so some physicists want to reject it, if for no other reason that it isn't particularly elegant.
Well, it turns out that the Higgs Boson weighs in at about 126, so it is almost precisely at a fork in the road that doesn't rule in or out either theory. The hope is that at higher energies, LHC may actually uncover a few other particles (which would tend to confirm at least the general outline of Supersymmetry). And that's basically where the film ends.
Ok, so here are my thoughts or interpretation of what the real issues are. Given the fact that at the Big Bang, the universe was expanding at a truly incredible rate (perhaps even faster than light speed), it is not clear what slowed it down to the current rate of expansion. It is pretty clear that, at those speeds, matter simply couldn't have congealed to form the galaxies that exist today. So was gravity stronger at some point and then switched to its lower, relatively weak force observed today? Is there a huge amount of invisible, dark matter lurking about in the universe? Is it hidden in galactic cores? Are neutrinos heavy enough to make up all or most of the missing dark matter? Perhaps the most fundamental question, only touched on lightly in the film, is what happened to all the anti-matter that should exist? There should be just as much anti-matter as matter, but this hasn't been observed, though (I believe) it is largely theorized that the anti-matter is somehow related to the dark matter.
Finally and perhaps the most upsetting consequence of the theories is that the Higgs Boson might be an unstable particle and could theoretically wink out of existence, causing matter to break apart at the most fundamental level. Would this be limited to a small pocket of space, or could it set up a chain reaction where the universe literally vanishes in a puff of smoke. Frankly, this seems so absurd as to hardly be worth mentioning. Some theorists have been thinking too hard about Schrödinger's cat experiments, which are not really supposed to have any meaning beyond the subatomic level. But this is probably the same group of people who seem to feel that once we pin down the Higgs Boson and truly measure it, then it will disappear, taking us with it (like Lewis Carroll's hunt for the Snark?).
I guess in a way this sets up the multiverse concept, where indeed there are some other pockets of the multiverse where Higgs weighs more or less, or its weight changes (with catastrophic consequences) or indeed, it has vanished.
What seems to be at the heart of the Supersymmetry/Multiverse debate** is different understandings of the the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, though I don't believe the film ever used the term. Anyway, here is a concise review that goes into some of the key points raised in one of the books dedicated to the concept. At its very strongest, the principle assumes that the universe only exists in order that it may be measured and thus the different particle weights and strengths of the various forces are set at just the precise levels that would allow matter to congeal and intelligence to arrive (not necessarily limited to life on Earth). At its strongest, it is more theology than science (cosmology).
However, even at its middle level, there are some troubling consequences. Physicists and scientists in general have always had to struggle to reconcile how unlikely it is for intelligent life to have evolved, and now with the finding that the universe is expanding millions of times slower than it ought to (by rights), then some take this as a personal affront. One actually says that it is as if someone twiddled the knobs exactly so that the universe expanded not too fast and not too slow -- and that even a tiny bit in either direction and the universe couldn't have supported life. He thinks this is so unlikely that he has become a supporter of the multiverse concept which basically says most of the universes in the multiverse are empty of life but that we are in a random side pocket where the values all just happen to align. This supposedly takes the Intelligent Designer or God as a Divine Watchmaker out of the equation. I tend to favour the Supersymmetry option of a single universe (born of pure randomness), but when you think of just how extremely unlikely it all would have to be for things to work out just as they did, well, perhaps a bit of humility is in order. There is just so much that humans do not know and probably will never know, but it is exciting to see these physicists attempting to stretch the boundaries of knowledge.
Edit to add: I guess it was inevitable that there would be some YouTube videos with some decent science behind them. Here is the starting video for Crash Course - Big History. It looks like they wrap up the history of the universe in 10 short videos. I really should sit down and watch them all, but that will have to be at a later date. The tone is a bit off for my taste (compared to Particle Fever) but that seems to be what sells today -- two parts scientist, one part hipster. I will also try to check out the YouTube series on astronomy by Phil Plait, but that is apparently going to have 40 entries, which is a pretty significant investment of time. Still, there is no question you can't please everyone. There are some people who are savagely attacking Particle Fever for making it all about the emotions and the thrill of the hunt (cue manipulative background music) and being very light on the science itself, which I did note. I think these critics go too far, but I agree there probably ought to have been just a bit more core science at the start, particularly a better roadmap to the Standard Theory itself.
* Not really all that different from me reading a few books on relativity, including one written by Albert Einstein for a general audience, while in high school and thinking that I had any real understanding of what was going on. That still didn't prevent me a couple of years ago from re-acquiring the same books and planning on passing them onto my children at some point...
** While the stakes (and certainly the maths) are much lower in transportation engineering, there is a little bit of a divide between the people more or less wedded to conventional models that have econometric theory at their heart and those who are pushing for agent-based simulations that seem to feel that running simulations in large numbers will get much closer to the true randomness of traffic on the roads today. (I'm somewhat oversimplifying both positions.) I can see the agent-based approach someday taking over the field, as it "looks" cooler and relies on Big Data and other trendy concepts, but I will regret it when that day comes. Just like those older physicists, I'll feel that I largely wasted my time in a field that no longer values my contributions. Ok, at this point, I have to get outside and stop dwelling on these trends that are a bit too upsetting for me right now.
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