Interview with Makers of the Film Particle Fever
"A continuation of 400 years of attempting to discover what reality is"
July 21, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The following are excerpts from an interview on The Michael Slate Show (KPFK Pacifica radio) with Mark Levinson and David Kaplan, director and producer, respectively, of the documentary film Particle Fever. The interview aired July 11, 2014.
Michael Slate: What is this film about? What’s the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment? Explain a little bit about all of that. David, why don’t you start on that?
David Kaplan: Yeah. The Large Hadron Collider is an experiment. It’s an enormous experiment. It’s a 16-and-a-half mile around ring that is about 300 feet underground. It crosses the French-Swiss border. It is at a lab called CERN, which is a center for particle physics in Europe. The acronym doesn’t work anymore.
CERN has been there for 60 years, looking at the basic laws of physics, trying to understand what matter is, and what are the properties of matter and the properties of space-time. The purpose of this specific experiment, the LHC, was to push deeper into that knowledge. And one of the things they hoped to have found, and they did find, was the Higgs boson. That is a particle that gets added to the short list of fundamental particles that make up all the dynamics of fundamental matter: how matter works, why atoms exist, and the properties of space-time to allow it to exist.
To do that, they reproduce, in a sense, a tiny fraction of the conditions that existed at a very, very early point in the universe when all these particles were bouncing around smashing into each other. And by reproducing that little image way back at that point, at very high temperatures, you get a better, broad sense of the laws of physics, and the rules. And those underlying rules tell us a lot about what we are and what matter is.
Michael Slate: What made you think that there was something in this film in particular that was really going to be a lot of fun to do, that you could be passionate about, and that would make a real difference in the world?
Mark Levinson: I actually started my film career by getting a PhD in theoretical particle physics. So, in some ways, it may have been a very unintended destiny, but why I thought it was going to be exciting was for all the reasons why I originally got involved in physics: that I knew that this was an incredible field. In particle physics you’re contemplating the most basic, fundamental elements of the universe and how it works.
But after I got my PhD, I moved into filmmaking. I had been in the narrative film world, the fiction world, had not seen very good depictions of science and scientists and the scientific process, and certainly nothing that captured the incredible excitement of this field. I hoped there might be some way to make a film that combined these two strands of my life. I thought I would maybe write a script about something, or some scientist, and then when I heard about this, realized that this was a monumental event, and when I contacted David, found that he was also not interested in doing a typical science documentary. But we wanted to do something that was completely different in terms of capturing the real process, the real lives of the characters and what was going on. So to me, it was the perfect combination of these things.
As a storyteller, I could see the potential for a good dramatic story. Of course, we had no idea that it would turn out to be way more dramatic than we expected. That’s the nature of documentary. Once I signed on, I was just along for the ride wherever it went.
Michael Slate: You’ve talked about this being the biggest physics experiment in the history of humanity. This is a huge, huge thing. And it’s not just because it’s got these giant things out there, all this stuff that’s out there, which is really remarkable when you see it in the film. It’s just going to blow your mind, folks. But these kinds of projects, they take people beyond the borders of where you think your limitations are. And I thought there’s a polemic in there, waged in a very good way, of why these kinds of projects are tackled, and what you do when you’re confronted with the unknown.
David Kaplan: I think in a historical context, you have to look at what this is, as a continuation of 400 years of attempting to discover what reality is. What is physical reality, and how is our interpretation of it flawed, in terms of actually making predictions about the future, what it is, how we got here, what it’s made of. It quantitatively started with Galileo and Newton, and it’s continued to now. So in a sense, this is just a continuing process with whatever is going on in the world politically, sociologically, this is just something that’s always been, luckily, in the background. It’s a testament to humanity that we actually do this, and we continue to do it.
The guise you see it in now is through the lens of what the modern-day world is, and international politics and science funding and all these things. But this is a very old process and procedure. And you’re right. What it does is, it answers some things—which is pure knowledge! In economic terms, you can call it a “public good.” Once we know these things, they don’t go away. And I think that it is really important for humanity in the broadest of contexts. What is this going to build us? Is it going to make computers faster? Does it cure disease? No. At least, that’s not why we’re doing it. We’re going after it for very pure reasons, for pure knowledge, and it’s something that’s a gift to the entire world, once it comes. If it becomes useful for something, okay.
But this is truly what is around us. And what’s more exciting than exploring the world we live in? This is one way of doing it. And this way gives us some very deep insights about how we got here in the first place.
Michael Slate: And it gives some very deep insights as well into the nature—as a friend of mine said, not “human nature,” but the nature of humanity in terms of actually the constant seeking to understand the world, as it is around you, and as it’s changing, and I think actually to change it as well based on what you understand. It’s an incredible argument in that direction.
David Kaplan: Absolutely. It changes me. It’s had a profound impact on me. It’s made me approach the rest of my life differently. The deeper I go into science, the broader perspective I have on what life is. Something that a number of popularizers like to say in different ways is that we are just physical manifestations of the laws of physics. We are coming out of the stuff that makes up the entire universe, and we’re governed by the laws that make those up. So in a sense, we’re a tiny fraction of the universe that’s exploring itself. We’re a manifestation such that, it’s complicated enough that we are now looking back at ourselves. So in a sense, we are part of the entire universe, and we happen to be a very particular part which is sentient [able to think] and can explore the rest of it.
Michael Slate: Mark, I’d like to ask you this. One of the things that was really interesting in relation to showing people an inside look at the working lives of scientists was the role of collectivity. It was astounding in this. And I thought both in terms of the numbers and who, but also the way that people worked together, without ego, to try and solve problems, which was really, I think, a very important aspect of this.
Mark Levinson: I think it is, and I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t realize. Well, certainly nobody realizes the scale that this is at. It’s 10,000 scientists around the world. The experiments themselves—we focused on the ATLAS experiment, the CMS experiment is of comparable size. Each of them has between two and three thousand scientists working on it all over the world. They’re working on this enormous, enormous piece of equipment that has so many components, that are very specialized, and nobody really understands all of the components, so they’re really dependent on that.
But then there’s also this whole other branch of the physicists, which is the theorists, and I think that that’s something that people outside of the field don’t realize, that there is a distinction. Everybody in the field knows it, and it’s very crucial. I think it’s a fundamental fact of particle physics that is absolutely necessary. These two different camps, the theorists, who are coming up with the theories, or working at the blackboard, coming up with ideas of how the universe works actually have to interact with the experimentalists to verify or actually get indications of how the theories might be modified. And there’s a very interesting dynamic that goes on there. I think that’s one of the main things we wanted to bring out in the film as well, that there is this necessary interaction. They need each other, even though sometimes they work almost as if they’re in completely different universes.
Then even within that, I think within the theory community—the stereotype is the theorist is this sort of isolated genius sitting there just coming up with equations. But what we show is that there’s actually a lot of interaction there as well. There’s a lot of dynamic interaction and discussion and argument. It’s a very hard pursuit, and you need a lot of brains working on it to make progress.
Michael Slate: David, what do you have to say about this relationship between the theoretical and the experimental physicists?
David Kaplan: This is sort of a newish situation. Things have just gotten so complicated that we have to split it up. So you become an expert in one or the other. The theories require a pretty deep level of mathematics, and the experiments require a broad understanding of basically everything from plumbing to computing to data analysis, as well as particle physics. So the division has to be there. And because of it, I think we’ve adopted very different attitudes toward the physics world or toward science. Both are necessary. So we have a nice, healthy suspicion of each other.
The experimentalists, as a sort of consequence, when they were first seeing hints that the Higgs was there, something was there, the theorists all decided that it was there. They decided they already knew what the number was, and they were already going off—they meaning me—writing new theory papers assuming the Higgs has already been discovered. Whereas the experimentalists, even on July 4, 2012, when they had 5-sigma* [five standard deviations] evidence, they were cautious that they discovered something—it may be the Higgs, but we don’t know. And even nine months later, they were only willing to say it was a “Higgs-like” particle.
So these different attitudes are both incredibly important. You need this very loose, limber creativity. And then you need the rigor of both the mathematics and experimental verifications for all of this to work.
Michael Slate: And then in the film you talked about, and it was shown, you have the relationship between the experimental and theoretical physicists, and then you have the kind of struggle—and I have to tell you, folks, this is a film that keeps you sitting on the edge of your seat, even though you know what they’re going to find in some way at the end of it, those of you who’ve paid attention to what’s developing in the scientific world, and the world in general. You’re aware of where things are going to end up to a certain extent, but there’s actually this real sort of edge-of-your-seat motion to this film.
What was at stake there? What was at stake with finding the Higgs particle? What was at stake there? And you talk about, there was a debate between whether the universe is beautiful and ordered, or a chaotic multi-verse, and that this had repercussions that went way beyond anything that one might immediately see in front of them.
David Kaplan: Absolutely. In fact, the core reason why I wanted to make the film in the first place was that I saw this dichotomy, and I saw that we were all freaked out about what was coming. The theorists had spent our entire careers speculating, what is the underlying theory beyond what’s called the Standard Model of Particle Physics? The Standard Model of Particle Physics is a list of particles and how they interact. Some of them are parts of the atom, and some are other things, which only last tiny fractions of a second. So we don’t interact with them very much. But the Standard Model has been the theory since the 1960s, and there was only one particle left, which was the Higgs.
There were deep mysteries about this theory, and we thought, well, those deep mysteries should be solved by a deeper theory, some deeper mathematics, more structure, more symmetry, something more beautiful that can explain those things. What is most of the universe made of? Why are particles the masses that they are? A number of questions, which maybe sound esoteric, or simple, but should be answered by the most fundamental theory that describes nature.
So we’ve been on this warpath to get that. But there’s been speculation for a number of years that maybe the laws of physics themselves are not immutable. Maybe they are just a manifestation of where we live. Another way of saying it is that you could marvel at the fact that the earth is in this amazing position that it could support life. It’s not a few percent closer to the sun, or a few percent farther away. It’s right where it needs to be at the right angle, spinning the right amount, with the right plate tectonics, and the right atmosphere to support us. What a miracle it is that that exists!
Of course, now we’re discovering that there are many, many planets out there, that it’s very likely almost every star in our galaxy has one or more planets—and that’s a hundred billion (100,000,000,000) stars. And we’re one galaxy of a hundred billion galaxies in our observable universe. So the chances that there would be a planet in the right spot with the right conditions are incredibly good. So we don’t try to come up with deep theories to explain why the earth is exactly where it is, although that’s something that people were doing 500 years ago. Now, we say that this is just historical accident.
Now the question is, when we measure laws of physics, there’s this fundamental particle, there’s this fundamental force of nature. Are those things telling us about directly the deep theory of everything? Or are they just manifestations of this universe, or of this part of the universe? And if so, some of the numbers we measure may simply be random. And some of the particles we measure may be random accidents of things that appear in our universe. Which means they are no longer clues to the deeper theory. They are just dead ends. In other universes, the laws of physics may be different. Why do we live in this universe where the laws are such that we have stars and galaxies and planets and people? Where else would we live? We’re not going to grow up on a planet which is deadly. And we’re not going to grow up in a universe which has no structure. We’re going to grow up in a universe that has all the laws necessary.
So we’re unfortunately biased by our own existence. Because it’s required that we exist in order for us to be here to study these things. But if the laws of nature can be different in different places, we’re going to only live in the place where we can live, where structure does exist. And so whenever we measure something at these colliders, now we’re starting to think, are we seeing something fundamental, or are we just cataloging? As [Ernest] Rutherford used to say, you’re either doing science or you’re stamp collecting. That’s the question that we’re asking. Are we on to something fundamental, or is it a dead end? And I would caution to say, we’re never going to be, I don’t think, at a dead end, this is all we can learn, that’s it. But certainly for our generation, we may have come to a place where we don’t know where to go next, and we won’t have the tools to facilitate the next discoveries. We won’t know, without lots of exploration, but it may just be a generational thing. And that’s an emotional context for a film, more than anything else.
Michael Slate: Mark, let me ask you this—the music in the film. And I’m going someplace with this, because the music was—I kept watching it, and I thought, “Wow, this is like something that like, captures both the enormity of the project, and of the quest that’s been undertaken there, and the sort of minutiae in a certain way. But it gives it the right amount of grandeur and import. I was really moved by that, including with the physics rap, which, folks, you have to see the film to see that physics rap. You don’t want to miss that either. But I wanted to ask you this, Mark, the music and all the rest of this, it’s part of a theme that runs throughout the film, the overlap and interpenetration of science and art, which is sort of counter-intuitive if you don’t think about it a whole lot, it’s sort of counter-intuitive. But you bring out that there’s a lot of similarities between physics and art. Can we talk about that?
Mark Levinson: Sure. Well, this was something that was a very important element to try to convey in the film for me, personally, as somebody who went from physics into art, in a sense, and something that many people see as this very strange discontinuity, but for me, even at that time was already seeing parallels. What I say is that I think I began to feel that in some sense, it’s all about man trying to represent the world around him. In physics, in science, you’re using mathematics as a language, but you’re trying to come up with a symbolic representation that somehow is simple, but encapsulates a lot more.
That’s a similar process in the arts. You may be using words in poetry, or you could use painting, or a bunch of images in a film that you somehow put together in a way that gives a representation of the world. It helps us understand the world; understand our place in the world. So it was always something that I was very interested in somehow conveying, and then we discovered organically how to incorporate it.
Then I was given this great gift when Nima [Arkani-Hamed] himself actually started talking to me about the Werner Herzog film, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. He had gone to a special screening, and he started talking about this, and the connection that he felt to these people, the very earliest people—the first people who had this idea of symbolic representation. What made some cave man decide that he should draw something on a cave that represented the world around him? This was a fundamental step that continues to today. So it was something that I was very happy to bring out.
Of course we try to use all the tools of filmmaking, including the music, to tell a story. That’s one of the things that appeals to me about film in particular as an art, is that you get to use images—photography—and words and music, all in the course of trying to tell an important story. I’m very excited that you liked the music. Our composer Robert Miller was extremely enthusiastic. He does a lot of science things. It was a long process, and getting it just right was something that was important. We didn’t want something that was just a typical sort of score, but something that also conveyed emotionality, but also something capturing what we felt was the right sound.
Michael Slate: David, in the film there are some very important things in terms of the scientific method, how you approach the world, how you look at reality and truth, including the view of failure. You do all this stuff, you find out that, “Well, everything we knew was wrong.” But now you know the truth about what you originally thought. And somebody else said—David, was it your mentor?—that said the key to success is being able to do “Failure after failure with undiminished enthusiasm”?
David Kaplan: Yes, that was Savas [Dimopoulos].
Michael Slate: Which I thought caught something, and I think it’s linked to a comment you made which said, in exploration, you need a set of people with no rules. Let’s talk about that a little.
David Kaplan: Sure. Scientists get into a lot of trouble because when they talk about science, theories or whatever is happening, they do it very cautious-sounding. They don’t commit. They say, “This might be true.” “This is likely to be true.” They don’t like to say this is just true. And it’s because we’re really always on the path of trying to show that the last theory was a failure. We’re trying to figure out what is wrong with our description of the world. We’ll probably never have the perfect description. And the only way to make progress is to poke holes in the description we have. And we’ve been doing it for so many years, hundreds of years, that our descriptions are so incredibly good it becomes incredibly difficult to poke any holes and to find the deeper theory. So you really do have to get used to failure.
The process really lives around failure. When I come up with an idea, I think about it. I think, can it really work? Does this work? I get excited about it, and I immediately start sharing it with other physicists. And their immediate reaction, if it’s interesting, is to try to tear it apart, to tell me that I’m wrong, or no, it must have been done before. Or it’s obvious for some reason. And we all try to poke holes in it. So the process is in a sense looking for failure constantly. When you can’t get it, you put all your might into trying to kill something, and you can’t, and your colleagues can’t, and the greater community can’t, then it’s exciting. Then you’re on to something. But only then.
There’s a morality to doing science, which is, you have to be incredibly honest, honest with yourself, honest with the community, and you have to be incredibly rigorous about every step you do. For me, this is a beautiful way of living in general, but it is absolutely necessary in doing any sort of science.
Mark Levinson: I saw an interesting quote recently. It may have been by [Alfred North] Whitehead, and he was talking about the fact that, in philosophy when you come up with a contradiction, that’s the end of your argument. But in science, when you come up with a contradiction, that’s the beginning of a whole new approach. I thought it was very interesting about the difference, echoing what David was just saying, too. You’re looking for failure. You’re looking for something that is wrong, that tells you how to go forward.
Michael Slate: Mark, I wanted to ask you a last question. David said how he was changed by this film. How about you? How did working on this film and the film itself change you?
Mark Levinson: There were many levels in some sense. Reconnecting to physics, at the most obvious level. I had moved into the film world. But I think moving again in this community, it reawakened the excitement that I felt, and my awe at what we have done as humans in this field, and I think in some senses has catalyzed perhaps the direction I’m going to go in, even with future films, trying again to talk about this story, to talk about the parallels between art and science, these two things that as you said, may not even be obviously similar, but I think needs to be pursued, regardless of practical applications.
So I think that’s the message: film, art, science, these things that are least necessary for our survival are the things that we need to pursue. I hope that guides my future choice, and my future projects.
* The scientists, students, journalists and others who gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 4, 2012; the other scientists, journalists and others gathered at the same time in Australia; and the untold thousands watching the live webcast on their laptops around the world were waiting to hear one thing: the number 5, or actually 5-sigma. When Fabiola Gianotti of the ATLAS experiment said that number, there was cheering, applause, high fives.
According to the Particle Fever website:
“Sigma, in a statistical sense, is the deviation from some norm and can represent a probability. When a 5-Sigma excess is announced (like evidence for the Higgs), the chance that the Higgs is not there and the data is due to a random fluctuation is 1 in 3.5 million.
“So a standard deviation is a statistical term that defines how probable it is that an event is out of the ordinary, that it stands out from the background. Five standard deviations means that it’s about 3,500,000 to one that it’s not just a fluctuation in the base or background. This very high degree of probability is required to prove certain things in physics, like the existence of a new particle.” [back]
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.