I have two computers running. The first, my 17-inch mac laptop, is connected to our firewire tape deck and a giant 500GB hard drive and is digitizing some of the 120 hours of footage we have shot so far. We have two of these big hard drives now, bringing our hard-drive total to nearly two terrabytes.
Video is incredibly, incredibly storage hungry. Each hour-long interview takes up about 15 gigabytes. And just a three years ago, when we started this project, hard drives cost a lot of money, so we could only afford a grand total of 250 gigabyes. So we had to digitize our beautiful footage at low-resolution.
Let me try that again: we have 120 hours of video for this documentary. 120 hours X 15 gigabytes = 1800 gigabytes, or 1.8 terrabytes. In the editing room you want to be able to see and access all of it, so what were we going to do?
Luckily, Final Cut Pro (the video editing software I use) has a low-resolution setting. You can digitize your video footage at a lower rate that cuts the size by about a factor of ten.
Unfortunately, a bi-product of this lower resolution means that the video footage looks fuzzy and is 1/2 the size. So I've been cutting together our film by watching it on a frame about the size of a credit card.
But thanks to rapidly declining hard drive costs (here's a great chart that shows the initial cost per megabyte in 1956 [$10,000] and the cost in 2004 [per GIGABYTE, $1.15]. Should be noted that the cost has approximately halved since then) we were able to purchase our terrabyte last month. So, at long last, the reason for this post: I'm finally able to start digitizing everything at full-resolution, and will soon see all our interview subjects and Fermilab's incredible environment in crisp detail and at full size.
I bring all this up because we've been lucky enough to have access to quite a bit of vintage fermilab footage, and in an interview in the 1980s Leon Lederman was discussing how he imagined advances in computer technology would mean faster processors, more storage space, and therefore more ability to analyze particle collisions. There are literally millions of collisions between protons and anti-protons that take place in the giant donut-shaped detectors at Fermilab. The computer systems from a few decades ago recorded information about them on tape, and (I'm surmising here) could most likely only pay attention to a percentage of the collisions that happened (the equivalent of fuzzy, half-sized images). Now, with the banks and banks of computers that are orders of magnitude faster and with vast, practically unlimited quantities of hard-drive space, the detectors can "look at" many more collisions (this is called the "trigger," and is one of the things Ben Kilminster works with) and determine in a split zillionth of a second which ones are boring and ordinary and can be ignored, which ones are possibly interesting (a few of which should be saved and looked at later), and which ones are "golden collisions," as Lederman said and need to be saved and studied in great detail. As I said, all this happens MILLIONS of times per second. Only possible with the incredible speed of computers and the drastic reductions in cost that computer equipment has seen in the last couple of decades. It's been estimated that CERN is going to generate one dvd of data per second. Per second! That's 4.7 gigabytes per second, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. Just not possible a couple of decades ago. Want 500 gigabytes of hard drive space in 1989? It's going to cost you. It cost about $800 for 20 MEGAbytes back then: 500 GB would be over... wait for it... 16 million dollars. Ha! Now, you can plunk down less than $200 bucks. As John Conway pointed out to us, a huge factor in the amazing advances in high energy physics is a result of simple economics (and Moore's Law). Stuff is cheaper now.
So, I'm digitizing in full-resolution, and Ben Kilminster is looking at amazing amounts of good data in his work with the trigger, and you're reading this blog split seconds after I post it. All thanks to our friends in Silicon Valley. Makes even more funny the (purported) statement from Thomas Watson, Sr., president of IBM from the 1920s through the 1950s, that "there is a world market for maybe five computers." If that were the case, I'd be a heck of a lot more handy with film, razor blades, and adhesive; Ben Kilminster would be spooling through miles of magnetic tape; and you would have no idea our film exists.
OK, so it doesn't exist YET...
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
Possible explanation for all the rumors?
Good grief, yet another article about this rumor about the possible discovery of the Higgs! This one from no less than ABC news, which looks like it picked up the story verbatim from Wired.
This stuff is infectious --- despite being told clearly from one of the leaders of the search for the Higgs that no, it's just a rumor, seeing it appear so many times in the media has an effect! Is it possible?
I don't think so. I think the media, like the Queen Mary, is very hard to stop once set in motion. And here's something no one seems to be picking up: that D-zero at Fermilab DID make a discovery of a new particle that was just published. They discovered a baryon called the "cascade b" baryon, having three different kinds of quarks. It only lasts for a few trillionths of a second. Here's a link to that story, which didn't seem to grab national headlines just last week when it was announced. Doesn't it seem likely that THIS was the particle that caused all the rumors?
I do have to admit, however, that what Judy Jackson (the PR person at Fermilab, whom we have interviewed a couple of times) said is actually more notable for what she DIDN'T say:
"We're delighted that there is this level of interest, but we can't say too strongly that there are some stringent criteria for being able to claim one has seen something in a particle physics experiment," said Fermilab spokeswoman Judy Jackson. "There are many examples of things that people thought they have seen that have promptly disappeared."
It does make one curious why she didn't just come out and say "No. It's all a rumor. We didn't find it. We'll let you know," just like John Conway told us.
This stuff is infectious --- despite being told clearly from one of the leaders of the search for the Higgs that no, it's just a rumor, seeing it appear so many times in the media has an effect! Is it possible?
I don't think so. I think the media, like the Queen Mary, is very hard to stop once set in motion. And here's something no one seems to be picking up: that D-zero at Fermilab DID make a discovery of a new particle that was just published. They discovered a baryon called the "cascade b" baryon, having three different kinds of quarks. It only lasts for a few trillionths of a second. Here's a link to that story, which didn't seem to grab national headlines just last week when it was announced. Doesn't it seem likely that THIS was the particle that caused all the rumors?
I do have to admit, however, that what Judy Jackson (the PR person at Fermilab, whom we have interviewed a couple of times) said is actually more notable for what she DIDN'T say:
"We're delighted that there is this level of interest, but we can't say too strongly that there are some stringent criteria for being able to claim one has seen something in a particle physics experiment," said Fermilab spokeswoman Judy Jackson. "There are many examples of things that people thought they have seen that have promptly disappeared."
It does make one curious why she didn't just come out and say "No. It's all a rumor. We didn't find it. We'll let you know," just like John Conway told us.
More rumor mill
And I thought we had single-handedly dispelled the rumor about the discovery of the higgs at Fermilab. I'm stunned that my blog hasn't been referenced by all the news media. I mean, after all, didn't we already set the record staight three posts ago? (wink) Apparently not: another article.
Friday, June 15, 2007
A nod to our interns
We're lucky --- through a couple of university programs, word of mouth, and a couple of "hey, I like the project --- can I help?" conversations, we have a terrific staff of seven interns. Sarah is looking up media clips and checking on rights and availability, Gracie is currently writing up our next grant proposal, Stephen and Robert are beginning to step up as assistant editors, Tricia has been working on transcriptions, Mars has been compiling our film festival plan, and Ross has been working on graphic design and scanning. Having them makes our monthly meetings a lot more fun. There's good energy around the room.
Our next hope is that we can get some office space donated in the loop somewhere --- we've got a couple of leads on that.
Our next "deadline" is a screening at the veritable Kartemquin on June 29. The goal is to have the first 2/3 of the film done by then.
Back to work...
Our next hope is that we can get some office space donated in the loop somewhere --- we've got a couple of leads on that.
Our next "deadline" is a screening at the veritable Kartemquin on June 29. The goal is to have the first 2/3 of the film done by then.
Back to work...
Thursday, June 14, 2007
The race is still on ... again
Back when I first got interested in this project, what drew me to the story was the race between Fermilab and CERN to find the Higgs boson. Since we started filming nearly three years ago, that aspect of the story was downplayed by the Fermilab scientists ("it's a competitive collaboration." "It doesn't matter who gets there first; everybody wins." "We work there, they work here. It's not really about 'us' vs. 'them.' Well, sort of. But not really.") So we concentrated on other things, and turns out there were some really fascinating parts of the story (politics, culture, etc) that kept our attention.
But we're storytellers, and that notion of a race just kept simmering below the surface.
Well, it turns out we're not the only ones who have been thinking in terms of a competition. Despite assurances to the contrary from some physicists, there is definitely a race on, and there has always been. At least, according to the media there is. Consider this article from across the pond in The Guardian from London. I'll quote some choice bits for you. First of all, the article tells us of "a certain nervousness among Europe's scientific elite" as CERN grows closer to completion. They insist that when CERN is switched on in November of this year it will "hum into life as expected," yet nevertheless "there is an air of concern in the corridors and offices of the LHC's home at Cern, Europe's particle physics laboratory."
Why? Why is CERN concerned? Why are Europe's scientific elite breaking out into a sweat?
The competition, my friend, the competition. It's heating up. I love this part, the explanation of what's got the Europeans so nervous:
Such worries are focused less on the possible failure, however, and more on the issue of timing. Physicists know it will take months to tune their hadron collider (hadrons are a class of particle that includes the proton) to a perfect pitch so it churns out the data that they need to find new particles. And that gap could be awkward, for delays just might allow a bunch of upstart Americans, using a rival, older and less powerful device, to beat Europe to the draw. For the past few months, scientists at the Fermilab laboratory in Illinois have hinted that their ageing accelerator, the Tevatron, may be on the threshold of uncovering the Holy Grail of modern physics: the Higgs boson, or the God particle, as it is sometimes known.
"A bunch of upstart Americans?" Makes it sound like a few dudes got together in a parking lot. But it gets better:
Finding the Higgs was a prime reason for constructing the LHC [the collider at CERN]. Its tunnels, super-conducting magnets, experiment halls and banks of computers have been put together with this very much in mind. For almost a decade, Cern has concentrated on this project, at the expense of virtually all other research. But now, at the last minute, the Yanks are threatening to steal Europe's thunder: a galling prospect.
Oh, that's rich. "The Yanks: a galling prospect." It's funny that they say "at the last minute" here. Fermilab and "the yanks" have been searching for the Higgs all along, since the 70s and 80s. That was one of the main reasons we almost built the Superconducting Supercollider. If Fermilab does find the Higgs, it certainly won't be as if they just decided to start looking on a whim last year. Chris Quigg, one of the first theoretical physicists we interviewed, has dedicated a good part of his life to the search. And Leon Lederman wrote a whole book about it (unfortunately) titled "The God Particle." They even call it "The God Particle" in this article. [Lederman swears the editor forced that title on him because he said they had to sell more books].
And if there was any more doubt?
European scientists insist they are not downhearted. If the Americans want a battle, they can have one. 'We have spent most of the last decade building this machine,' says Professor Jim Virdee, of Imperial College London. 'Now we are almost there. There is a real buzz about the place. The race is on.'
The article is just loaded with juicy suggestions of a race between these two rival labs. And there is a really great setup here: a classic David and Goliath. CERN is seven times more powerful than Fermilab, it's brand new, and has a palpable buzz of excitement. Fermilab, on the other hand, is old (built in the late 60s), less powerful, and the scientists there are fully aware that its accelerator has only a couple of years of operation before the plug gets pulled. CERN estimates (with some bravado, perhaps) that they'll be lucky "to make more than one or two [Higgs particles] a day." It will therefore take "several months," we're told, before they can confirm they've found it. Several months? Sigh. Fermilab estimates it will take several years unless they're really lucky.
But luck may be on their side. Due to a most unfortunate, really, most unfortunate accident, some of the magnets that Fermilab built for CERN ... well, they blew up. Sorry! So the latest estimates, written after this article came out, are that CERN won't be up and running this November, but rather will be put back until April 2008. Oops!
All kidding aside, no one seriously believes that Fermilab did any kind of sabotage to hurt its rival's chances. And we don't either. But an article just sent to me by Monica today proclaims that Fermilab is now considering keeping the Tevatron, "Fermilab's venerable particle accelerator," up and running for an extra year.
Mmmm... sounds like a race to me...
But then again, I guess I AM in the media.
But we're storytellers, and that notion of a race just kept simmering below the surface.
Well, it turns out we're not the only ones who have been thinking in terms of a competition. Despite assurances to the contrary from some physicists, there is definitely a race on, and there has always been. At least, according to the media there is. Consider this article from across the pond in The Guardian from London. I'll quote some choice bits for you. First of all, the article tells us of "a certain nervousness among Europe's scientific elite" as CERN grows closer to completion. They insist that when CERN is switched on in November of this year it will "hum into life as expected," yet nevertheless "there is an air of concern in the corridors and offices of the LHC's home at Cern, Europe's particle physics laboratory."
Why? Why is CERN concerned? Why are Europe's scientific elite breaking out into a sweat?
The competition, my friend, the competition. It's heating up. I love this part, the explanation of what's got the Europeans so nervous:
Such worries are focused less on the possible failure, however, and more on the issue of timing. Physicists know it will take months to tune their hadron collider (hadrons are a class of particle that includes the proton) to a perfect pitch so it churns out the data that they need to find new particles. And that gap could be awkward, for delays just might allow a bunch of upstart Americans, using a rival, older and less powerful device, to beat Europe to the draw. For the past few months, scientists at the Fermilab laboratory in Illinois have hinted that their ageing accelerator, the Tevatron, may be on the threshold of uncovering the Holy Grail of modern physics: the Higgs boson, or the God particle, as it is sometimes known.
"A bunch of upstart Americans?" Makes it sound like a few dudes got together in a parking lot. But it gets better:
Finding the Higgs was a prime reason for constructing the LHC [the collider at CERN]. Its tunnels, super-conducting magnets, experiment halls and banks of computers have been put together with this very much in mind. For almost a decade, Cern has concentrated on this project, at the expense of virtually all other research. But now, at the last minute, the Yanks are threatening to steal Europe's thunder: a galling prospect.
Oh, that's rich. "The Yanks: a galling prospect." It's funny that they say "at the last minute" here. Fermilab and "the yanks" have been searching for the Higgs all along, since the 70s and 80s. That was one of the main reasons we almost built the Superconducting Supercollider. If Fermilab does find the Higgs, it certainly won't be as if they just decided to start looking on a whim last year. Chris Quigg, one of the first theoretical physicists we interviewed, has dedicated a good part of his life to the search. And Leon Lederman wrote a whole book about it (unfortunately) titled "The God Particle." They even call it "The God Particle" in this article. [Lederman swears the editor forced that title on him because he said they had to sell more books].
And if there was any more doubt?
European scientists insist they are not downhearted. If the Americans want a battle, they can have one. 'We have spent most of the last decade building this machine,' says Professor Jim Virdee, of Imperial College London. 'Now we are almost there. There is a real buzz about the place. The race is on.'
The article is just loaded with juicy suggestions of a race between these two rival labs. And there is a really great setup here: a classic David and Goliath. CERN is seven times more powerful than Fermilab, it's brand new, and has a palpable buzz of excitement. Fermilab, on the other hand, is old (built in the late 60s), less powerful, and the scientists there are fully aware that its accelerator has only a couple of years of operation before the plug gets pulled. CERN estimates (with some bravado, perhaps) that they'll be lucky "to make more than one or two [Higgs particles] a day." It will therefore take "several months," we're told, before they can confirm they've found it. Several months? Sigh. Fermilab estimates it will take several years unless they're really lucky.
But luck may be on their side. Due to a most unfortunate, really, most unfortunate accident, some of the magnets that Fermilab built for CERN ... well, they blew up. Sorry! So the latest estimates, written after this article came out, are that CERN won't be up and running this November, but rather will be put back until April 2008. Oops!
All kidding aside, no one seriously believes that Fermilab did any kind of sabotage to hurt its rival's chances. And we don't either. But an article just sent to me by Monica today proclaims that Fermilab is now considering keeping the Tevatron, "Fermilab's venerable particle accelerator," up and running for an extra year.
Mmmm... sounds like a race to me...
But then again, I guess I AM in the media.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
The Rumor Mill
A couple of weeks ago I was at Northwestern, where I teach, getting ready for a screening of some of my students' work. I got an email that read "interesting article." Included was a link to an article on Slate, the online magazine. The title? "Quantum Scoop: The Holy Grail of Particle Physics May Already Have Been Found."
Ulp --- !! Huh??
It gives a nice summary of the situation in the first couple of paragraphs, highlighting all the press the Higgs boson has been garnering of late. Then it goes on to say
"A rumor flying around physics departments these last few weeks claims that physicists working at the Tevatron, an accelerator located outside of Chicago, have found something new. Originally passed by word of mouth and private e-mail, the rumor made it into the blogosphere May 28, with an anonymous comment on the blog of a particle physicist living in Venice, Italy. Since then, the rumor has spread."
Naturally, I ran outside and started doing some phone calling. I then ran back inside and dashed off an email to our friends at Fermilab. I mean, after all --- we're in touch with the people leading the search for the Higgs boson. Surely they would have at least given us a phone call? Email? Letter? No? It honestly wasn't too hard to imagine: they're excited, working feverishly, checking and cross-checking, and maybe the last thing they would do is stop and think "oh, yeah, we should get in touch with those guys making the documentary." As I've mentioned before, sometimes I feel as though I have to continually remind them that we're still here.
So I got an email back from John Conway pretty quickly. He said he was curious about it all --- a science writer from the NYTimes had emailed him earlier. He wanted me to send him the link. I did, and he wrote back that "the rumor had been flying around for several weeks." He said, quite directly, "we don't have anything like that, I can assure you."
So, I breathed a sigh of relief. But at the same time, I must confess I was disappointed. I had gotten a glimpse of the kind of moment a documentary filmmaker dreams of, only to have it disappear as quickly as a decaying subatomic particle (I must really apologize for that analogy).
But two things gave me encouragement. The first was another line from John a few days later that said "the hunt is heating up, who knows what we'll find..." and the second was his assurance that "We will let you know, I promise!"
Ulp --- !! Huh??
It gives a nice summary of the situation in the first couple of paragraphs, highlighting all the press the Higgs boson has been garnering of late. Then it goes on to say
"A rumor flying around physics departments these last few weeks claims that physicists working at the Tevatron, an accelerator located outside of Chicago, have found something new. Originally passed by word of mouth and private e-mail, the rumor made it into the blogosphere May 28, with an anonymous comment on the blog of a particle physicist living in Venice, Italy. Since then, the rumor has spread."
Naturally, I ran outside and started doing some phone calling. I then ran back inside and dashed off an email to our friends at Fermilab. I mean, after all --- we're in touch with the people leading the search for the Higgs boson. Surely they would have at least given us a phone call? Email? Letter? No? It honestly wasn't too hard to imagine: they're excited, working feverishly, checking and cross-checking, and maybe the last thing they would do is stop and think "oh, yeah, we should get in touch with those guys making the documentary." As I've mentioned before, sometimes I feel as though I have to continually remind them that we're still here.
So I got an email back from John Conway pretty quickly. He said he was curious about it all --- a science writer from the NYTimes had emailed him earlier. He wanted me to send him the link. I did, and he wrote back that "the rumor had been flying around for several weeks." He said, quite directly, "we don't have anything like that, I can assure you."
So, I breathed a sigh of relief. But at the same time, I must confess I was disappointed. I had gotten a glimpse of the kind of moment a documentary filmmaker dreams of, only to have it disappear as quickly as a decaying subatomic particle (I must really apologize for that analogy).
But two things gave me encouragement. The first was another line from John a few days later that said "the hunt is heating up, who knows what we'll find..." and the second was his assurance that "We will let you know, I promise!"
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Big Press
Big story in the New York Times, written by our interview subject Peter Overbye: "A Giant Takes On Physics' Biggest Questions." All about CERN, how huge it is, how wonderful it will be when it turns on. They've got their targets set firmly on The Higgs boson:
[Dr. Fabiola Gianotti, a CERN physicist] listed possible discoveries like a mysterious particle called the Higgs that is thought to endow other particles with mass, new forms of matter that explain the mysterious dark matter waddling the cosmos and even new dimensions of spacetime.
“For me,” Dr. Gianotti said, “it would be a dream if, finally, in a couple of years in a laboratory we are going to produce the particle responsible for 25 percent of the universe.”
But this part really interested me, as you can imagine:
Game of Cosmic Leapfrog
The advent of the Cern collider also cements a shift in the balance of physics power away from American dominance that began in 1993, when Congress canceled the Superconducting Supercollider, a monster machine under construction in Waxahachie, Tex. The supercollider, the most powerful ever envisioned, would have sped protons around a 54-mile racetrack before slamming them together with 40 trillion electron volts.
For decades before that, physicists in the United States and Europe had leapfrogged one another with bigger, more expensive and, inevitably, fewer of these machines, which get their magic from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy that these machines can pack into their little fireballs, the farther back in time they can go, closer and closer to the Big Bang, the smaller and smaller things they can see.Recalling those times, Dr. Evans said: “There was a nice equilibrium across the Atlantic. People used to come and go.”
Now, Dr. Evans said, “The center of gravity has moved to Cern.”
The most powerful accelerator now operating is the trillion-electron volt Tevatron, colliding protons and their antimatter opposites, antiprotons, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. But it is scheduled to shut down by 2010.
There is also a really terrific page or so on the Higgs boson, our favorite little particle. Oh, what the heck, I'll just paste it in here. It includes a quote from our own John Conway.
Cocktail Party Physics
The payoff for this investment, physicists say, could be a new understanding of one of the most fundamental of aspects of reality, namely the nature of mass.
This is where the shadowy particle known as the Higgs boson, a k a the God particle, comes in.
In the Standard Model, a suite of equations describing all the forces but gravity, which has held sway as the law of the cosmos for the last 35 years, elementary particles are born in the Big Bang without mass, sort of like Adam and Eve being born without sin.
Some of them (the particles, that is) acquire their heft, so the story goes, by wading through a sort of molasses that pervades all of space. The Higgs process, named after Peter Higgs, a Scottish physicist who first showed how this could work in 1964, has been compared to a cocktail party where particles gather their masses by interaction. The more they interact, the more mass they gain.
The Higgs idea is crucial to a theory that electromagnetism and the weak force are separate manifestations of a single so-called electroweak force. It shows how the massless bits of light called photons could be long-lost brothers to the heavy W and Z bosons, which would gain large masses from such cocktail party interactions as the universe cooled.
The confirmation of the theory by the Nobel-winning work at Cern 20 years ago ignited hopes among physicists that they could eventually unite the rest of the forces of nature.
Moreover, Higgs-like fields have been proposed as the source of an enormous burst of expansion, known as inflation, early in the universe, and, possibly, as the secret of the dark energy that now seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe. So it is important to know whether the theory works and, if not, to find out what does endow the universe with mass.
But nobody has ever seen a Higgs boson, the particle that personifies this molasses. It should be producible in particle accelerators, but nature has given confusing clues about where to look for it. Measurements of other exotic particles suggest that the Higgs’s mass should be around 90 billion electron volts, the unit of choice in particle physics. But other results, from the Lep collider here before it shut down in 2000, indicate that the Higgs must weigh more than 114 billion electron volts. By comparison, an electron is half a million electron volts, and a proton is about 2,000 times heavier.
“We’ve nearly ruled out the Standard Model, if you want to say it that way,” said John Conway, a Fermilab physicist. The new collider was specifically designed to hunt for the Higgs particle, which is key both to the Standard Model and to any greater theory that would supersede it.
Theorists say the Higgs or something like it has to show up simply because the Standard Model breaks down and goes kerflooey at energies exceeding one trillion electron volts. If you try to predict what happens when two particles collide, it gives nonsense, explained Dr. Ellis of Cern, a senior theorist with the long white hair and a bushy beard to prove it.
“There is either a violation of probability or some new physics,” Dr. Ellis said.
Nima Arkani-Hamed of Harvard said he would bet a year’s salary on the Higgs.
“If the Higgs or something like it doesn’t exist,” Dr. Arkani-Hamed said, “then some very basic things like quantum mechanics are wrong.”
A result, Dr. Gianotti said, is “either we find the Higgs boson, or some stranger phenomenon must happen.”
Once I was of the opinion that our story was growing cold. Now I think we're poised pretty well --- assuming we don't drag our feet...
[Dr. Fabiola Gianotti, a CERN physicist] listed possible discoveries like a mysterious particle called the Higgs that is thought to endow other particles with mass, new forms of matter that explain the mysterious dark matter waddling the cosmos and even new dimensions of spacetime.
“For me,” Dr. Gianotti said, “it would be a dream if, finally, in a couple of years in a laboratory we are going to produce the particle responsible for 25 percent of the universe.”
But this part really interested me, as you can imagine:
Game of Cosmic Leapfrog
The advent of the Cern collider also cements a shift in the balance of physics power away from American dominance that began in 1993, when Congress canceled the Superconducting Supercollider, a monster machine under construction in Waxahachie, Tex. The supercollider, the most powerful ever envisioned, would have sped protons around a 54-mile racetrack before slamming them together with 40 trillion electron volts.
For decades before that, physicists in the United States and Europe had leapfrogged one another with bigger, more expensive and, inevitably, fewer of these machines, which get their magic from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy that these machines can pack into their little fireballs, the farther back in time they can go, closer and closer to the Big Bang, the smaller and smaller things they can see.Recalling those times, Dr. Evans said: “There was a nice equilibrium across the Atlantic. People used to come and go.”
Now, Dr. Evans said, “The center of gravity has moved to Cern.”
The most powerful accelerator now operating is the trillion-electron volt Tevatron, colliding protons and their antimatter opposites, antiprotons, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. But it is scheduled to shut down by 2010.
There is also a really terrific page or so on the Higgs boson, our favorite little particle. Oh, what the heck, I'll just paste it in here. It includes a quote from our own John Conway.
Cocktail Party Physics
The payoff for this investment, physicists say, could be a new understanding of one of the most fundamental of aspects of reality, namely the nature of mass.
This is where the shadowy particle known as the Higgs boson, a k a the God particle, comes in.
In the Standard Model, a suite of equations describing all the forces but gravity, which has held sway as the law of the cosmos for the last 35 years, elementary particles are born in the Big Bang without mass, sort of like Adam and Eve being born without sin.
Some of them (the particles, that is) acquire their heft, so the story goes, by wading through a sort of molasses that pervades all of space. The Higgs process, named after Peter Higgs, a Scottish physicist who first showed how this could work in 1964, has been compared to a cocktail party where particles gather their masses by interaction. The more they interact, the more mass they gain.
The Higgs idea is crucial to a theory that electromagnetism and the weak force are separate manifestations of a single so-called electroweak force. It shows how the massless bits of light called photons could be long-lost brothers to the heavy W and Z bosons, which would gain large masses from such cocktail party interactions as the universe cooled.
The confirmation of the theory by the Nobel-winning work at Cern 20 years ago ignited hopes among physicists that they could eventually unite the rest of the forces of nature.
Moreover, Higgs-like fields have been proposed as the source of an enormous burst of expansion, known as inflation, early in the universe, and, possibly, as the secret of the dark energy that now seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe. So it is important to know whether the theory works and, if not, to find out what does endow the universe with mass.
But nobody has ever seen a Higgs boson, the particle that personifies this molasses. It should be producible in particle accelerators, but nature has given confusing clues about where to look for it. Measurements of other exotic particles suggest that the Higgs’s mass should be around 90 billion electron volts, the unit of choice in particle physics. But other results, from the Lep collider here before it shut down in 2000, indicate that the Higgs must weigh more than 114 billion electron volts. By comparison, an electron is half a million electron volts, and a proton is about 2,000 times heavier.
“We’ve nearly ruled out the Standard Model, if you want to say it that way,” said John Conway, a Fermilab physicist. The new collider was specifically designed to hunt for the Higgs particle, which is key both to the Standard Model and to any greater theory that would supersede it.
Theorists say the Higgs or something like it has to show up simply because the Standard Model breaks down and goes kerflooey at energies exceeding one trillion electron volts. If you try to predict what happens when two particles collide, it gives nonsense, explained Dr. Ellis of Cern, a senior theorist with the long white hair and a bushy beard to prove it.
“There is either a violation of probability or some new physics,” Dr. Ellis said.
Nima Arkani-Hamed of Harvard said he would bet a year’s salary on the Higgs.
“If the Higgs or something like it doesn’t exist,” Dr. Arkani-Hamed said, “then some very basic things like quantum mechanics are wrong.”
A result, Dr. Gianotti said, is “either we find the Higgs boson, or some stranger phenomenon must happen.”
Once I was of the opinion that our story was growing cold. Now I think we're poised pretty well --- assuming we don't drag our feet...
Sunday, May 6, 2007
First Act...
...finished. What's a first act? Movies, whether you notice or not, are made in a 3-act structure. Nothing very provocative about it: Act One: setup. Establish characters, situation, set an objective in motion. Act One ends with a hint of difficulties to come. Act Two: introduce complications. Obstacles. Conflict is built. Act Three: resolution, one way or another. In a feature film of say, 90-95 minutes, you might have a 30 min act 1, a 45 min act 2, and a 15-20 min act 3. Our act one? Clocks in at a tidy 31:05. Curtain rises on act two today...
PS thanks for the comments to the last post. Don't worry, most of that was metaphorical hand-wringing. Part of it is also a little excitement that ours is definitely not a "dead" topic. I'd much rather have to struggle with where to cut off following an exciting story than ... well, you get the picture.
PPS Congratulations to us! (OK, to our producer Andrew, mostly): we just were awarded a $10,000 grant from the Illinois Humanities Council!
PS thanks for the comments to the last post. Don't worry, most of that was metaphorical hand-wringing. Part of it is also a little excitement that ours is definitely not a "dead" topic. I'd much rather have to struggle with where to cut off following an exciting story than ... well, you get the picture.
PPS Congratulations to us! (OK, to our producer Andrew, mostly): we just were awarded a $10,000 grant from the Illinois Humanities Council!
Sunday, April 8, 2007
The story keeps going whether we want it to or not
That's our problem. We're editing, and things keep happening.
A new twist has developed, one that sounds straight out of a Grisham novel. Here are the facts: as you know if you've been reading, Fermilab (our heroes) are competing against the monolithic European goliath, CERN (the villain), to discover the secrets of the universe. Who will find it first? Does small but plucky Fermilab stand a chance?
OK, so that's not quite right. That maybe the pitch line we use to pique a film festival programmer's interest, but in fact the story is much more complex than that. Including the very blurred line between the two institutions. It's true they are in "competition" to find the Higgs Boson (and therefore take a crucial step towards understanding the fundamental way the universe works), but as Leon Lederman says, "it's a competitive collaboration." Fermilab would love to find it first, but after a few curse words and a stiff drink, they'd ultimately be glad if CERN found it first. The key thing in the physicists mind is that SOMEONE find it. Everyone will benefit. It's not as though this is the commercial science world, where CERN would slap a quick patent on the Higgs boson and it would become a corporate secret.
In fact, many of the Fermilab scientists are heavily involved in the work of building CERN and getting it ready to come online later this year. One of our main "characters," John Conway, has been actively involved in this for quite some time. Fermilab has been building parts and shipping them overseas to Geneva, where CERN is located, for a few years now. Some of the parts we've seen, long magnets to go inside the tunnel, have "FERMILAB" proudly emblazoned on them to indicate Fermilab's contribution to the glistening new machine that will ultimately drive their smaller, older one out of business.
But here's where the thriller novel plot twist comes in. As I've said, CERN will come online this year. But as Ben Kilminster, the rollerblading lead-singer / experimental physicist said, they'll come online for some preliminary tests, then in 2008 there will be higher-level tests, then finally, if nothing goes wrong, in 2009 they'll be taking real data. THEN, and only then, will they start looking for the Higgs boson in earnest. This means that Fermilab has about 48 or 60 months of operation to keep looking for the Higgs.
And the ironic thing is, the Tevatron, Fermilab's machine, is cranking on all cylinders. In fact, it's like they've added another cylinder to the engine, because it's roaring ahead, taking data at an unprecedented rate. Couple that with the recent discovery that the Higgs might lie more within Fermilab's target range than CERN's (see the "Where are those #$%@ keys??" entry below), and the folks at Fermilab are pretty excited.
And then --- uh, oh --- remember those magnets that Fermilab had built for CERN? The ones that are critical to getting CERN up and running on schedule? They were installed, tested, and .... BANG! Exploded! Ummm, oops. Hmmmm.... suspicous, you say? Fermilab building parts for the competition, and they blow up, you say? Now the schedule for CERN coming online is in serious jeopardy? Giving Fermilab even more time to find the Nobel-magnet Higgs boson? Hmmmmm.....
If you were thinking along those lines, you wouldn't be the only one. The science press has been all over this. A representative quote:
"CERN is reporting that the giant magnets that steer the particle beam
in the new and highly anticipated Large Hadron Collider have just
failed catastrophically in a stress test, apparently due to a design
oversight. It doesn't help that the magnets were designed and built by CERN's
US competitor Fermilab."
Here's the BBC article, complete with the photo of the "Fermilab" - labeled magnet in question. Here's the story from Australia, here's the story in the highly-respected journal Nature, specifically mentioning how it may delay the hunt for the Higgs and informing us that the failure caused a bang so loud the people nearby had to have their ears checked, and here is Fermilab's own article about it. The article in The Sunday Times from London quoted Pier Odonne, whom we have interviewed, as being "apparently furious and embarrased," and said that he wrote to his staff saying they had caused "a pratfall on the world stage." Apparently the error was a very simple oversight, and Pier said “We are dumb-founded that we missed some very simple balance of forces. Not only was it missed in the engineering design but also in the four engineering reviews carried out between 1998 and 2002 before launching the construction of the magnets.”
Also from that article: "Dr Lyn Evans, who leads the accelerator construction project at Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research, said the explosion had been potentially very dangerous.
“There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place,” he said. “The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt.” An investigation by Cern researchers found “fundamental” flaws that caused the explosion, close to the CMS detector, one of the LHC’s most important experiments."
And finally, as if John Grisham himself were writing the story, the article wraps up with "Coincidentally, Fermilab stands to gain most from delays at Cern. Its researchers also operate a rival but less powerful particle accelerator, the Tevatron. Fermilab staff are pushing the Tevatron to ever-higher energies hoping that they might find the Higgs boson before the LHC switches on. An LHC researcher said: “Ironically, this delay could be all they need.”
Do we believe Fermilab did it on purpose? Of course not. The Australian story got at that directly. It said "CERN has no suspicion that the failure was deliberate on the part of Fermilab, a spokesperson says. "Their scientific credibility would be compromised. It is in their interest that [the Large Hadron Collider] function properly," the CERN spokesperson says.
Monica and I have been struggling how to (and if to) incorporate this into our story. Even though we don't believe for a second that Fermilab did anything untoward in order to gain more time to look for the Higgs, as Monica said, we have to address it if it is a dramatic story element that affects the search for the Higgs and Fermilab's future.
Whew. Sometimes I wish everyone would just stop working for a few months while we get this movie done. Can't they just wait a while to find the answers to the mysteries of the universe? I mean, is it really THAT important? Sigh.
A new twist has developed, one that sounds straight out of a Grisham novel. Here are the facts: as you know if you've been reading, Fermilab (our heroes) are competing against the monolithic European goliath, CERN (the villain), to discover the secrets of the universe. Who will find it first? Does small but plucky Fermilab stand a chance?
OK, so that's not quite right. That maybe the pitch line we use to pique a film festival programmer's interest, but in fact the story is much more complex than that. Including the very blurred line between the two institutions. It's true they are in "competition" to find the Higgs Boson (and therefore take a crucial step towards understanding the fundamental way the universe works), but as Leon Lederman says, "it's a competitive collaboration." Fermilab would love to find it first, but after a few curse words and a stiff drink, they'd ultimately be glad if CERN found it first. The key thing in the physicists mind is that SOMEONE find it. Everyone will benefit. It's not as though this is the commercial science world, where CERN would slap a quick patent on the Higgs boson and it would become a corporate secret.
In fact, many of the Fermilab scientists are heavily involved in the work of building CERN and getting it ready to come online later this year. One of our main "characters," John Conway, has been actively involved in this for quite some time. Fermilab has been building parts and shipping them overseas to Geneva, where CERN is located, for a few years now. Some of the parts we've seen, long magnets to go inside the tunnel, have "FERMILAB" proudly emblazoned on them to indicate Fermilab's contribution to the glistening new machine that will ultimately drive their smaller, older one out of business.
But here's where the thriller novel plot twist comes in. As I've said, CERN will come online this year. But as Ben Kilminster, the rollerblading lead-singer / experimental physicist said, they'll come online for some preliminary tests, then in 2008 there will be higher-level tests, then finally, if nothing goes wrong, in 2009 they'll be taking real data. THEN, and only then, will they start looking for the Higgs boson in earnest. This means that Fermilab has about 48 or 60 months of operation to keep looking for the Higgs.
And the ironic thing is, the Tevatron, Fermilab's machine, is cranking on all cylinders. In fact, it's like they've added another cylinder to the engine, because it's roaring ahead, taking data at an unprecedented rate. Couple that with the recent discovery that the Higgs might lie more within Fermilab's target range than CERN's (see the "Where are those #$%@ keys??" entry below), and the folks at Fermilab are pretty excited.
And then --- uh, oh --- remember those magnets that Fermilab had built for CERN? The ones that are critical to getting CERN up and running on schedule? They were installed, tested, and .... BANG! Exploded! Ummm, oops. Hmmmm.... suspicous, you say? Fermilab building parts for the competition, and they blow up, you say? Now the schedule for CERN coming online is in serious jeopardy? Giving Fermilab even more time to find the Nobel-magnet Higgs boson? Hmmmmm.....
If you were thinking along those lines, you wouldn't be the only one. The science press has been all over this. A representative quote:
"CERN is reporting that the giant magnets that steer the particle beam
in the new and highly anticipated Large Hadron Collider have just
failed catastrophically in a stress test, apparently due to a design
oversight. It doesn't help that the magnets were designed and built by CERN's
US competitor Fermilab."
Here's the BBC article, complete with the photo of the "Fermilab" - labeled magnet in question. Here's the story from Australia, here's the story in the highly-respected journal Nature, specifically mentioning how it may delay the hunt for the Higgs and informing us that the failure caused a bang so loud the people nearby had to have their ears checked, and here is Fermilab's own article about it. The article in The Sunday Times from London quoted Pier Odonne, whom we have interviewed, as being "apparently furious and embarrased," and said that he wrote to his staff saying they had caused "a pratfall on the world stage." Apparently the error was a very simple oversight, and Pier said “We are dumb-founded that we missed some very simple balance of forces. Not only was it missed in the engineering design but also in the four engineering reviews carried out between 1998 and 2002 before launching the construction of the magnets.”
Also from that article: "Dr Lyn Evans, who leads the accelerator construction project at Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research, said the explosion had been potentially very dangerous.
“There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place,” he said. “The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt.” An investigation by Cern researchers found “fundamental” flaws that caused the explosion, close to the CMS detector, one of the LHC’s most important experiments."
And finally, as if John Grisham himself were writing the story, the article wraps up with "Coincidentally, Fermilab stands to gain most from delays at Cern. Its researchers also operate a rival but less powerful particle accelerator, the Tevatron. Fermilab staff are pushing the Tevatron to ever-higher energies hoping that they might find the Higgs boson before the LHC switches on. An LHC researcher said: “Ironically, this delay could be all they need.”
Do we believe Fermilab did it on purpose? Of course not. The Australian story got at that directly. It said "CERN has no suspicion that the failure was deliberate on the part of Fermilab, a spokesperson says. "Their scientific credibility would be compromised. It is in their interest that [the Large Hadron Collider] function properly," the CERN spokesperson says.
Monica and I have been struggling how to (and if to) incorporate this into our story. Even though we don't believe for a second that Fermilab did anything untoward in order to gain more time to look for the Higgs, as Monica said, we have to address it if it is a dramatic story element that affects the search for the Higgs and Fermilab's future.
Whew. Sometimes I wish everyone would just stop working for a few months while we get this movie done. Can't they just wait a while to find the answers to the mysteries of the universe? I mean, is it really THAT important? Sigh.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Nothing like a deadline...
...to scare the living daylights out of you. Recently, Andrew, Monica and I sat down with one of our intrepid interns, Mars (his real name is Scott Marsden Hanna, but everyone calls him Mars), who had put together some extensive research into film festivals.
For those of you who don't know, most of the films you see in the theatres are made by the major film studios or their so-called "indie" subsidiaries. Since it's a very high-dollar affair to get a film made and put into theatres, only companies with large pocketbooks can afford to do this (the same way it was until just a few years ago in the music business. A band had to be "signed" to a major label to get the expensive recording, manufacturing, distribution, advertising, etc done for them. The internet and the affordability of good recording equipment and software is changing this. The film world is a few years behind this).
But there are thousands of filmmakers making movies outside the studio system. Strike that; tens of thousands. What options do they have?
They depend on film festivals. You've heard of the big ones, like Cannes and Sundance. But there are more. Many, many more. Once an independent filmmaker has finished his or her film, s/he starts the at times grueling, at times disheartening, always expensive, but occasionally thrilling and fruitful film festival run. The idea is simple: you apply to many film festivals (the accepted "norm" for the average film is about 50) and hope to get accepted into several. If possible, you attend those festivals to which your film has been accepted, talking up your film, passing out promotional materials, angling for attention. If you're very very lucky, your film will generate a "buzz" and, hope against hope, win an award of some kind. If you're lucky enough to win an award at a major festival, you're on your way, and a lot depends on your preparedness and your ability to parlay this into catapulting yourself a several steps up the ladder from where you were before the festival. If you win an award at a smaller festival, though, this can still be a great opportunity: you might have better luck at getting accepted into a bigger festival, and chances are they'll pay more attention to your film when you get there. It also can put you in touch with producers, promoters, and the all important distributor, the one who might actually get you some kind of deal to get your movie distributed to theatres or to dvd, or to television or cable.
The tricky thing is timing. Where feature-length films are concerned (usually considered longer than 75 minutes or so, the category we fall into), film festivals are very competitive with each other. Exclusive, even. They won't consider your film if it has played somewhere else. Everyone wants a premiere. So you do what our intern, Mars, did: you do some research and find out the submission dates of all the major festivals (typically called A-list festivals): Sundance, Toronto, Cannes, AFI, Tribeca, Berlin, L.A., Seattle, SXSW, and put them on a calendar. You figure out a way to apply to the biggies first (usually in the order I have listed here) so that if Sundance doesn't accept you, you're free to accept Toronto. If they don't go for it, you can agree to Cannes, then AFI, etc. down the list. If you just start applying to festivals willy-nilly and take the first one you get (say the Great Plains Film Festival at the University of Nebraska), if suddenly Sundance writes you back and says "congratulations! You've been accepted to our festival!" You'll end up kicking yourself all over the room, because as soon as they find out about Nebraska (and they will) they'll rescind that invitation faster than you can say "But, Mr. Redford..."
So, back to where I started: nothing like a deadline. Our first festival application deadline is (gulp) June 10, for the Toronto Film Festival, generally considered to be #2 on the A-list behind Sundance. Luckily for us, they will accept an 80% completed cut, which means we don't have to have it completely perfect (there could be some rough sound bits, and some un-corrected color, possibly some stand in animations if ours aren't finished yet, and possibly temp music if our composer hasn't written the score yet), but it would behoove us to be as close to perfect as possible.
Which means, I need to stop typing this entry and get back to editing. (crack) that sound? The whip...
For those of you who don't know, most of the films you see in the theatres are made by the major film studios or their so-called "indie" subsidiaries. Since it's a very high-dollar affair to get a film made and put into theatres, only companies with large pocketbooks can afford to do this (the same way it was until just a few years ago in the music business. A band had to be "signed" to a major label to get the expensive recording, manufacturing, distribution, advertising, etc done for them. The internet and the affordability of good recording equipment and software is changing this. The film world is a few years behind this).
But there are thousands of filmmakers making movies outside the studio system. Strike that; tens of thousands. What options do they have?
They depend on film festivals. You've heard of the big ones, like Cannes and Sundance. But there are more. Many, many more. Once an independent filmmaker has finished his or her film, s/he starts the at times grueling, at times disheartening, always expensive, but occasionally thrilling and fruitful film festival run. The idea is simple: you apply to many film festivals (the accepted "norm" for the average film is about 50) and hope to get accepted into several. If possible, you attend those festivals to which your film has been accepted, talking up your film, passing out promotional materials, angling for attention. If you're very very lucky, your film will generate a "buzz" and, hope against hope, win an award of some kind. If you're lucky enough to win an award at a major festival, you're on your way, and a lot depends on your preparedness and your ability to parlay this into catapulting yourself a several steps up the ladder from where you were before the festival. If you win an award at a smaller festival, though, this can still be a great opportunity: you might have better luck at getting accepted into a bigger festival, and chances are they'll pay more attention to your film when you get there. It also can put you in touch with producers, promoters, and the all important distributor, the one who might actually get you some kind of deal to get your movie distributed to theatres or to dvd, or to television or cable.
The tricky thing is timing. Where feature-length films are concerned (usually considered longer than 75 minutes or so, the category we fall into), film festivals are very competitive with each other. Exclusive, even. They won't consider your film if it has played somewhere else. Everyone wants a premiere. So you do what our intern, Mars, did: you do some research and find out the submission dates of all the major festivals (typically called A-list festivals): Sundance, Toronto, Cannes, AFI, Tribeca, Berlin, L.A., Seattle, SXSW, and put them on a calendar. You figure out a way to apply to the biggies first (usually in the order I have listed here) so that if Sundance doesn't accept you, you're free to accept Toronto. If they don't go for it, you can agree to Cannes, then AFI, etc. down the list. If you just start applying to festivals willy-nilly and take the first one you get (say the Great Plains Film Festival at the University of Nebraska), if suddenly Sundance writes you back and says "congratulations! You've been accepted to our festival!" You'll end up kicking yourself all over the room, because as soon as they find out about Nebraska (and they will) they'll rescind that invitation faster than you can say "But, Mr. Redford..."
So, back to where I started: nothing like a deadline. Our first festival application deadline is (gulp) June 10, for the Toronto Film Festival, generally considered to be #2 on the A-list behind Sundance. Luckily for us, they will accept an 80% completed cut, which means we don't have to have it completely perfect (there could be some rough sound bits, and some un-corrected color, possibly some stand in animations if ours aren't finished yet, and possibly temp music if our composer hasn't written the score yet), but it would behoove us to be as close to perfect as possible.
Which means, I need to stop typing this entry and get back to editing. (crack) that sound? The whip...
Saturday, February 17, 2007
I'm in the closet
Recently, I built a rack in the closet by my desk to hold my trusty G5 computer, NTSC monitor, sound mixer, speakers, and my one terabyte of hard drive space. A few weeks ago I set up an automatic backup system, opened up Final Cut Pro, and got to work. Since then I've been seated here eight or ten hours a day (when I'm not teaching) with a mug of coffee, pulling individual happenings, minutes, and seconds out of the 130 hours of footage we have amassed and placing them in order, shuffling them around, shortening or stretching them until I'm happy, adding music, taking away music, adding titles and graphics, then sitting back and watching, adjusting, fiddling, struggling, finding the perfect solution, scrambling around for the perfect solution, watching some more, then shutting everything down and going to bed or taking a shower, still thinking, then occasionally rushing back over to turn everything back on and work some more.
So far I am approximately 1/4 - 1/3 through the rough cut. I'm putting things together from start to finish, so I've just passed the 30 minute mark. I'm really excited about what has come together so far.
Walter Murch, the famous editor and sound designer of such films as The Godfather 1-3, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, THX-1138, The English Patient, etc. etc. wrote once that sometimes he missed the old-fashioned way of editing, where you strung up film on spools, sliced it up with a razor blade, and put it back together with tape. The thing he said he missed most was when you had to rewind or forward through all the footage you weren't using. Unlike now, there was no way to suddenly jump to the middle of a reel. On the computer, you can just go to any spot you want, but on those old Steinbeck machines you had to sit patiently while all the film whizzed before you. Murch said that often the process of watching all that footage when you were looking for something else made connections happen; made ideas pop up that wouldn't have. You can plan an edit all you want, but sometimes the footage itself speaks to you and gives you opportunities and ideas that you could never have arrived at by yourself.
So I've been doing a lot of watching. When I'm looking for a second or two from a shot I remember, or trying to find a soundbite or bit of conversation, I make sure I watch and listen to as much of that 130 hours as I can. Over and over.
Incidentally, our first "goal" is to have the completed rough cut (!) by March 5. It would be a miracle, but I'm shooting for it. The first 30 minutes is easy --- now the harder part begins.
So far I am approximately 1/4 - 1/3 through the rough cut. I'm putting things together from start to finish, so I've just passed the 30 minute mark. I'm really excited about what has come together so far.
Walter Murch, the famous editor and sound designer of such films as The Godfather 1-3, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, THX-1138, The English Patient, etc. etc. wrote once that sometimes he missed the old-fashioned way of editing, where you strung up film on spools, sliced it up with a razor blade, and put it back together with tape. The thing he said he missed most was when you had to rewind or forward through all the footage you weren't using. Unlike now, there was no way to suddenly jump to the middle of a reel. On the computer, you can just go to any spot you want, but on those old Steinbeck machines you had to sit patiently while all the film whizzed before you. Murch said that often the process of watching all that footage when you were looking for something else made connections happen; made ideas pop up that wouldn't have. You can plan an edit all you want, but sometimes the footage itself speaks to you and gives you opportunities and ideas that you could never have arrived at by yourself.
So I've been doing a lot of watching. When I'm looking for a second or two from a shot I remember, or trying to find a soundbite or bit of conversation, I make sure I watch and listen to as much of that 130 hours as I can. Over and over.
Incidentally, our first "goal" is to have the completed rough cut (!) by March 5. It would be a miracle, but I'm shooting for it. The first 30 minutes is easy --- now the harder part begins.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Dusting off the camera...
We're planning on heading down to Fermilab on Wednesday. We're looking to speak with Rob Roser, Ben Kilminster, and Robin Erbacher about 1) the W mass discovery and what it means for the search for the Higgs (and Fermilab's chances of finding it) and 2) the recent budget developments. Our plan is to get them all 3 together, to try to have a more natural conversation and less of an "interview." We're also trying to get a little camera time with Fermilab director Pier Odonne, but so far we haven't heard from him. I'm afraid our last interivew may have rubbed him the wrong way --- we, as we tend to do, went on a little long. It's pretty common for us to say "OK, thank you. This is our last question." And then, 20 minutes later, we finally wrap things up. We're so interested in the conversation and looking for great quotes that we sometimes lose track of the fact that our subjects are REALLY ready to wrap things up. When we last spoke with Pier, that happened, and he said something like "I heard you guys go on and on..." So I'm a little worried that he might not be willing to speak with us for that reason, even though I tried to reassure him in the email asking for the interview. We'll see. He's been speaking to the press right and left about the budget developments, so I can hope that we get even a 5 minute soundbite for him. That's what we need at this point --- something to introduce that "plot" development.
I'll report back after wednesday and let you know how the interviews went and whether Dr. Odonne let us speak with him...
I'll report back after wednesday and let you know how the interviews went and whether Dr. Odonne let us speak with him...
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
When it rains...
I tell you, I've got new admiration for the press. They're all over our story!
Fermilab closes in on 'God particle' as site shutdown nears
and
Deficit cutting = bad news for science
and
The God Particle Maybe Loses Some Weight
and
Shrinking Higgs brings optimism to US lab
Fermilab closes in on 'God particle' as site shutdown nears
and
Deficit cutting = bad news for science
and
The God Particle Maybe Loses Some Weight
and
Shrinking Higgs brings optimism to US lab
Monday, January 8, 2007
Where are those #$%@ keys??
So, remember from the last post that conversation we had about the supposed hint of the Higgs from a university team in Iowa? Turns out that our folks at Fermilab were about to find some interesting data of their own. On December 14 they "opened the box" on the year's intake of data collected from the Tevatron. All year they work on simulated data so that the work they do doesn't get biased by what's really there. Then, all at once, they reveal the actual data and compare it to what they had been working with.
As I said before, the Higgs exists for a tiny fraction of an instant before decaying into something else. So, while the physicists at Fermilab are searching for the Higgs all the time, sometimes this search takes the shape of a search for something else. In this case, they had been looking for the mass of something called the W-boson, which is "a key parameter of the Standard Model of particles and forces." What this means is that if they can nail down the W-boson's mass, they can get a much better understanding of the mass for the Higgs boson. It's kind of like walking into a dark room nightclub. You know your keys are on the floor somewhere because someone at the party last night told you they kicked them and heard them sliding around. The more ways you can eliminate places you know your keys AREN'T, the quicker you can figure out where they might be. The physicists at Fermilab now have TWO limiters: they already famously found the mass of the top-quark a few years ago, and now the W-boson. It might be the equivalent of stumbling around the room until you suddenly realize half the room is carpeted (keys can't slide on carpet) AND one whole corner is taken up by a huge entertainment system. That only leaves one corner where the keys must be!
Luckily for Fermilab, this plays right into their hand. It turns out that their beloved Tevatron, that beautiful 4-mile accelerator we have spent 3 years getting to know, is suited best for searching the particular range that the Higgs is limited to. It's as if, after eliminating three of the four corners of the room where your keys could be, it turns out that the remaining fourth corner happens to be right under the stage lights! The best place they could possibly be in order to be found. Now all you have to do is flip on those blazing lights and start looking. With a little luck...
This makes the scientists very excited. In fact, Rob Roser wrote back to us and said the enthusiasm is high --- he's sounding suddenly confident they will find the Higgs there in two years! He says it's still a risk, of course, but that the risk is looking better and better, which means people will be willing to "wager" their professional time and energy to keep looking for it at Fermilab. He said they've restructured their group to better search this range, and that "we are now getting the tools in place we need to nail this baby."
They officially published this result today. You can read about it here,but I'll paste in a couple of important comments:
The new W-mass value leads to an estimate for the mass of the yet-undiscovered Higgs boson that is lighter than previously predicted, in principle making observation of this elusive particle more likely by experiments at the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab. By measuring the W-boson and top-quark masses with ever greater precision, physicists can restrict the allowable mass range of the Higgs boson, the missing keystone of the Standard Model.
"This new precision determination of the W boson mass by CDF is one of the most challenging and most important measurements from the Tevatron," said Associate Director for High Energy Physics at DOE's Office of Science Dr. Robin Staffin. "Together, the W-boson and top-quark masses allow us to triangulate the location of the elusive Higgs boson."
There's a link from that page to some graphics and pictures and some pretty clear explanations, including one that makes it look like instead of limiting the search to one corner of the room, it's more like one single floor tile... very exciting.
Some context: remember, CERN, the huge accelerator in Geneva, is scheduled to come online sometime this year. John Conway has said that while this is true, they'll still have to do tests, probably have a few snafus, a false start or two, some tweaks, adjustments, and THEN get it going. He estimates 2008 or even early 2009 before real, meaningful data can happen. And that's about exactly two years...
More on this next time...
As I said before, the Higgs exists for a tiny fraction of an instant before decaying into something else. So, while the physicists at Fermilab are searching for the Higgs all the time, sometimes this search takes the shape of a search for something else. In this case, they had been looking for the mass of something called the W-boson, which is "a key parameter of the Standard Model of particles and forces." What this means is that if they can nail down the W-boson's mass, they can get a much better understanding of the mass for the Higgs boson. It's kind of like walking into a dark room nightclub. You know your keys are on the floor somewhere because someone at the party last night told you they kicked them and heard them sliding around. The more ways you can eliminate places you know your keys AREN'T, the quicker you can figure out where they might be. The physicists at Fermilab now have TWO limiters: they already famously found the mass of the top-quark a few years ago, and now the W-boson. It might be the equivalent of stumbling around the room until you suddenly realize half the room is carpeted (keys can't slide on carpet) AND one whole corner is taken up by a huge entertainment system. That only leaves one corner where the keys must be!
Luckily for Fermilab, this plays right into their hand. It turns out that their beloved Tevatron, that beautiful 4-mile accelerator we have spent 3 years getting to know, is suited best for searching the particular range that the Higgs is limited to. It's as if, after eliminating three of the four corners of the room where your keys could be, it turns out that the remaining fourth corner happens to be right under the stage lights! The best place they could possibly be in order to be found. Now all you have to do is flip on those blazing lights and start looking. With a little luck...
This makes the scientists very excited. In fact, Rob Roser wrote back to us and said the enthusiasm is high --- he's sounding suddenly confident they will find the Higgs there in two years! He says it's still a risk, of course, but that the risk is looking better and better, which means people will be willing to "wager" their professional time and energy to keep looking for it at Fermilab. He said they've restructured their group to better search this range, and that "we are now getting the tools in place we need to nail this baby."
They officially published this result today. You can read about it here,but I'll paste in a couple of important comments:
The new W-mass value leads to an estimate for the mass of the yet-undiscovered Higgs boson that is lighter than previously predicted, in principle making observation of this elusive particle more likely by experiments at the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab. By measuring the W-boson and top-quark masses with ever greater precision, physicists can restrict the allowable mass range of the Higgs boson, the missing keystone of the Standard Model.
"This new precision determination of the W boson mass by CDF is one of the most challenging and most important measurements from the Tevatron," said Associate Director for High Energy Physics at DOE's Office of Science Dr. Robin Staffin. "Together, the W-boson and top-quark masses allow us to triangulate the location of the elusive Higgs boson."
There's a link from that page to some graphics and pictures and some pretty clear explanations, including one that makes it look like instead of limiting the search to one corner of the room, it's more like one single floor tile... very exciting.
Some context: remember, CERN, the huge accelerator in Geneva, is scheduled to come online sometime this year. John Conway has said that while this is true, they'll still have to do tests, probably have a few snafus, a false start or two, some tweaks, adjustments, and THEN get it going. He estimates 2008 or even early 2009 before real, meaningful data can happen. And that's about exactly two years...
More on this next time...
Where are those $#@% funds?
Here's the other side of the equation. While we're hearing of the exciting scientific developments in tracking down the Higgs boson, we're also hearing this:
Congressional Budget Delay Stymies Scientific Research
This article is very disconcerting. A representative quote: “The consequences for American science will be disastrous,” said Michael S. Lubell, a senior official of the American Physical Society, the world’s largest group of physicists. “The message to young scientists and industry leaders, alike, will be, ‘Look outside the U.S. if you want to succeed.’ ”
Essentially what has happened is that multiple spending bills were "left hanging" by the departing Republican majority. Some Republicans didn't want to finish them because by not doing so it doesn't allow certain spending increases to go into effect, and therefore keeps the bottom line down. It's like you're the CEO of a company and you decide to give raises, but when the time comes around you don't actually sign them into effect because you don't want to increase your spending. Apparently the incoming Democrats have stated they are not going to try to finish these bills. Instead, they're just going to keep everything under the current budget until fall.
Remember this post from one year ago? Where I was describing how Rob and Robin were clapping and cheering the new budget for 2007, in which they were to get some additional money? Well, that's the "raise" the CEO just decided not to sign into effect. But it is actually wrong to think of it as a "raise." As the article says, "Last year, Congress passed just 2 of 11 spending bills — for the military and domestic security — and froze all other federal spending at 2006 levels. Factoring in inflation, the budgets translate into reductions of about 3 percent to 4 percent for most fields of science and engineering."
Fermilab is not the only one to be suffering. Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York was severely affected. The article states it was already operating on charitable contributions (!) and might shut down entirely. Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee might have to delay opening for a year. The Stanford Linear Accelerator, research at universities across the US funded by the National Science Foundation, an oceaneanic observatory, a global polar research program, and even missions at NASA would all be affected. John Conway at UCDavis said that they can't even hire graduate students because there is no money for teaching assistantships.
The article specifically points out Fermilab: "Another potential victim is the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, where a four-mile-long collider investigates the building blocks of matter. Its director, Piermaria Oddone, said the laboratory would close for a month as most of the staff of 4,200 are sent home."
Ulp. Closing up shop for a month?? I got on the (email) horn with Rob Roser and John Conway. John said that Pier Odonne, Fermilab's director, vividly spelled out the consequences to Fermilab in a meeting a couple of days ago (again, sometimes I wish we would get some notification of these things... we always seem to hear about them after the fact. But they're much more important to us that we are to them). It might be, of course, that Pier is talking loudly to get lawmakers' attention. Will the lab be shut down? We'll see. Monica and I have been talking about dusting off the old video camera and making another trip down to Fermilab...
Which brings us to the next post...
Congressional Budget Delay Stymies Scientific Research
This article is very disconcerting. A representative quote: “The consequences for American science will be disastrous,” said Michael S. Lubell, a senior official of the American Physical Society, the world’s largest group of physicists. “The message to young scientists and industry leaders, alike, will be, ‘Look outside the U.S. if you want to succeed.’ ”
Essentially what has happened is that multiple spending bills were "left hanging" by the departing Republican majority. Some Republicans didn't want to finish them because by not doing so it doesn't allow certain spending increases to go into effect, and therefore keeps the bottom line down. It's like you're the CEO of a company and you decide to give raises, but when the time comes around you don't actually sign them into effect because you don't want to increase your spending. Apparently the incoming Democrats have stated they are not going to try to finish these bills. Instead, they're just going to keep everything under the current budget until fall.
Remember this post from one year ago? Where I was describing how Rob and Robin were clapping and cheering the new budget for 2007, in which they were to get some additional money? Well, that's the "raise" the CEO just decided not to sign into effect. But it is actually wrong to think of it as a "raise." As the article says, "Last year, Congress passed just 2 of 11 spending bills — for the military and domestic security — and froze all other federal spending at 2006 levels. Factoring in inflation, the budgets translate into reductions of about 3 percent to 4 percent for most fields of science and engineering."
Fermilab is not the only one to be suffering. Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York was severely affected. The article states it was already operating on charitable contributions (!) and might shut down entirely. Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee might have to delay opening for a year. The Stanford Linear Accelerator, research at universities across the US funded by the National Science Foundation, an oceaneanic observatory, a global polar research program, and even missions at NASA would all be affected. John Conway at UCDavis said that they can't even hire graduate students because there is no money for teaching assistantships.
The article specifically points out Fermilab: "Another potential victim is the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, where a four-mile-long collider investigates the building blocks of matter. Its director, Piermaria Oddone, said the laboratory would close for a month as most of the staff of 4,200 are sent home."
Ulp. Closing up shop for a month?? I got on the (email) horn with Rob Roser and John Conway. John said that Pier Odonne, Fermilab's director, vividly spelled out the consequences to Fermilab in a meeting a couple of days ago (again, sometimes I wish we would get some notification of these things... we always seem to hear about them after the fact. But they're much more important to us that we are to them). It might be, of course, that Pier is talking loudly to get lawmakers' attention. Will the lab be shut down? We'll see. Monica and I have been talking about dusting off the old video camera and making another trip down to Fermilab...
Which brings us to the next post...
Where is that $#@% movie??
Yes, yes, we know. We've been working on this film for ... uh, let me see... three years? The first blog entry was July, 2004. So, I guess that makes two and a half years. What gives???!!
Here's the latest. We are a bit behind where we thought we'd be, but mainly this is because our story kept going and going. Our original plan was to film the year in the life of the Tevatron, which would have been the year 2005 (December 2004 through December 2005). But, if you remember, they extended the run past December 2005. Here's a quote from my blog entry, November 2005:
In fact, that's the same reasoning behind Fermilab's recent decision to extend the current run of the Tevatron. Normally, the accelerator gets shut down every November so they can get inside, do repairs, upgrade things, and generally brush out the cobwebs. They keep it offline for about 6 weeks, then fire it back up again. We were present when they achieved the startup (although I looked back and saw that I didn't write an entry about that... might have to write one after the fact) and run it for 10 months. Our film was designed to run for a complete start-up to shut-down cycle -- a year in the life, if you will. But not long ago they determined that the Tevatron was running so well and luminosity was so high that they'd be crazy to shut it down. They moved the maintenance shut down date to March 1 --- we plan to keep shooting until then, although it doesn't tie the bow so neatly to shoot for 15 months instead of one year. On the other hand, this builds a little momentum, especially where Ben is concerned...
So we kept shooting until March 06, but in February the budget got interesting again, and then we got the opportunity to interview Natalie Angier and Dennis Overbye on the east coast ... We finally called a halt to shooting in late summer 06. I was busy at that time also finishing up a fiction film I had shot with Andrew and Stef called Galileo's Grave, and during that time we assembled a team of interns who began working on the post-production preparations. In the fall, Monica and I began having edit meetings, and by late December 06 we had assembled a solid paper edit. And, in fact, Saturday, January 6, 2007, was our first day of official editing. Our schedule is tight: we hope to have a rough cut by March, and a final cut by May (or possibly June). Then we'll take it to the world.
It is difficult though: as evidenced by the two posts you've just read, the story just won't stop. The two crucial legs of our story, the search for the Higgs boson and the state of science funding, keep walking. Now it seems they've stepped it up to a brisk run. The collision here is exactly where our story lies: Fermilab is getting so close to the Higgs they can sniff it, just as the federal budget starts yanking the rug they're standing on. Monica and I are meeting Tuesday to discuss. Can we continue to edit our film while at the same time dashing out to Fermilab to hear about the latest? How much can we cover in title cards at the end of the film? What about an epilogue? Obviously we're not going to wait 2 years to find out whether Fermilab finds the Higgs. We've already drawn the line once --- do we extend it?
Ah, the wonderful challenges of being a documentary filmmaker on a "hot" topic! At least, we think it's hot. Hopefully you do too, or else you wouldn't be reading this...
Here's the latest. We are a bit behind where we thought we'd be, but mainly this is because our story kept going and going. Our original plan was to film the year in the life of the Tevatron, which would have been the year 2005 (December 2004 through December 2005). But, if you remember, they extended the run past December 2005. Here's a quote from my blog entry, November 2005:
In fact, that's the same reasoning behind Fermilab's recent decision to extend the current run of the Tevatron. Normally, the accelerator gets shut down every November so they can get inside, do repairs, upgrade things, and generally brush out the cobwebs. They keep it offline for about 6 weeks, then fire it back up again. We were present when they achieved the startup (although I looked back and saw that I didn't write an entry about that... might have to write one after the fact) and run it for 10 months. Our film was designed to run for a complete start-up to shut-down cycle -- a year in the life, if you will. But not long ago they determined that the Tevatron was running so well and luminosity was so high that they'd be crazy to shut it down. They moved the maintenance shut down date to March 1 --- we plan to keep shooting until then, although it doesn't tie the bow so neatly to shoot for 15 months instead of one year. On the other hand, this builds a little momentum, especially where Ben is concerned...
So we kept shooting until March 06, but in February the budget got interesting again, and then we got the opportunity to interview Natalie Angier and Dennis Overbye on the east coast ... We finally called a halt to shooting in late summer 06. I was busy at that time also finishing up a fiction film I had shot with Andrew and Stef called Galileo's Grave, and during that time we assembled a team of interns who began working on the post-production preparations. In the fall, Monica and I began having edit meetings, and by late December 06 we had assembled a solid paper edit. And, in fact, Saturday, January 6, 2007, was our first day of official editing. Our schedule is tight: we hope to have a rough cut by March, and a final cut by May (or possibly June). Then we'll take it to the world.
It is difficult though: as evidenced by the two posts you've just read, the story just won't stop. The two crucial legs of our story, the search for the Higgs boson and the state of science funding, keep walking. Now it seems they've stepped it up to a brisk run. The collision here is exactly where our story lies: Fermilab is getting so close to the Higgs they can sniff it, just as the federal budget starts yanking the rug they're standing on. Monica and I are meeting Tuesday to discuss. Can we continue to edit our film while at the same time dashing out to Fermilab to hear about the latest? How much can we cover in title cards at the end of the film? What about an epilogue? Obviously we're not going to wait 2 years to find out whether Fermilab finds the Higgs. We've already drawn the line once --- do we extend it?
Ah, the wonderful challenges of being a documentary filmmaker on a "hot" topic! At least, we think it's hot. Hopefully you do too, or else you wouldn't be reading this...
Monday, November 20, 2006
A very small false alarm, with a fruity finish, and notes of lavender and lilac
Monica, my co-director, has made use of one of the internet's strengths. She has set up what I think of as an editorial assistant robot. This robot scours the internet to find articles and happenings of interest to her and to us: anything to do with the Higgs boson, Fermilab, the Tevatron, CERN, and other things. She's finely tuned this robot to send stuff our way that seems relevant to our story. She periodically sends highlights of the robot's findings to me.
Yesterday she sent along something that made me sit up in my chair and blink, cup of coffee in my hand. The article, from The New Scientist, was entitled "Fleeting Particle has Shades of Higgs." If that wasn't enough, the subhead really got my attention:
"The world's most wanted particle, the Higgs, may have already appeared under our very noses without anyone noticing."
Ulp. Huh?
What's more, the article was saying that someone named German Valencia, working at Iowa State University, was re-analyzing data already taken from Fermilab (!) from 1997-1999.
I'll just paste in the article here:
The world's most wanted particle, the Higgs, may have already appeared under our very noses without anyone noticing.
The hypothetical Higgs boson, which is thought to give all other particles their mass, was first proposed in the 1960s as part of the standard model of particle physics. Other models known as "supersymmetric" theories, which posit a heavy counterpart for every particle in the standard model, predict the existence of many different Higgs bosons, each with a different mass. It is the lightest one of these that may have already been produced, according to physicist German Valencia at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.
Valencia and colleagues re-analysed data collected between 1997 and 1999 by the HyperCP experiment at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. HyperCP was designed to monitor the decay of exotic particles in order to understand why the universe is filled with matter rather than antimatter. Valencia's team focused on the decay of a particle known as sigma into a proton, a muon and an antimuon . According to the standard model, the muon-antimuon pair should have energies that lie between 210 and 240 megaelectronvolts (MeV). But in the three events seen by the HyperCP experiment, they always had the same energy of 214 MeV.
Calculations using the standard model show that the probability of three decay events all generating a muon- antimuon pair with the same energy is about 0.008. "That's pretty low," says Valencia.
A more likely possibility, he says, is that the sigma decayed to a proton and another intermediate particle with a mass of 214 MeV. This intermediate particle then decayed into the muon-antimuon pair, fixing the pair's energy at that value. So what was that mystery particle? The Iowa team's calculations suggest it could be the lightest Higgs boson predicted by one theory of supersymmetry (www.arxiv.org/hep-ph/0610362 ).
"We were obviously very excited that the conditions matched the lightest Higgs," says Valencia. "But it's easy to say 'this could be the Higgs'. The tough part is explaining why this Higgs hasn't popped up in other particle physics accelerators."
To address this, the team calculated the probability of the light Higgs being produced from the decay of particles such as kaons and B-mesons, which have been widely studied at accelerator experiments, including those at CERN in Switzerland and SLAC in California. They found that the nature of the interaction of the Higgs with those particles made the production of the light Higgs highly unlikely.
Dan Kaplan, a member of the HyperCP collaboration at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, which was not intended to help search for the Higgs, is intrigued. However, he says that more work is needed to confirm the claim. Unfortunately, the HyperCP experiment cannot be repeated, because the proton beam used in the experiment has been shut down. "Three events aren't enough to get them to start it up again, so there's zero chance of rerunning the experiment," says Kaplan.
Another possibility is to re-analyse the old HyperCP data for overlooked decay processes, including any that might rule out the Higgs. Kaplan says, "I'm inspired to suggest to my colleagues that we look into this data again."
Valencia hopes that the Large Hadron collider being built at CERN will look for the production of the light Higgs through a number of processes that his team has described. "We hope our results will inspire new searches to confirm or refute that this is the Higgs," he says.
At this point I started to get a little suspicious. We've been interviewing no less than 10 experimental and theoretical physicists working AT Fermilab, not somewhere in Iowa, and I figured that if there was any sniff of the Higgs in previous data they would probably know something about it. So after writing back to Monica I sent of the following message to Rob Roser, John Conway, Robin Erbacher, Ben Kilminster, and Mark Oreglia (familiar names to my regular readers), all experimental physicists working at Fermilab except Dr. Oreglia, who was our first contact and who teaches at the University of Chicago.
Interestingly, my email started up a little mini-conference online between these five. Rob wrote back first, saying he hadn't read this article. Robin said the same thing. Then Ben asked if someone could send the article around. Mark said he hadn't heard of it, which made him suspect it was not sensational news. He found the article and sent it around, and asked the others how to explain to us, the filmmakers, why they don't "jump up and down when they see an article like this!" He gave a quick answer: the article mentioned only 3 events, which is very underwhelming in the world of science (in an earlier post somewhere I mention the fact that scientists hate exceptions and love trends). Then he goes on to say the schema in the paper sounds a bit contrived.
Then Ben chimed in to say that "First of all, this Higgs is not the one we are looking for." He goes on to say that the group who wrote this paper is describing a Higgs that would result from a model of the universe that there is no evidence for, instead of from the model that everyone else uses (the Standard Model). This Higgs, the one from the paper, would have a mass 500 times smaller than the one they are looking for at the Tevatron. In short, from what I can understand from Ben's reply, is that the "evidence" of this Higgs could actually exist well within the margins of experimentation. Almost as though it were part of a "plus or minus 1%" that you might expect from very complicated mathmatical figuring. Turns out that the possibility of this result just occuring without any meaning at all are 1 in 100. His conclusion is that it's not convincing, and is merely a curiosity that should be studied more. When it gets in the neighborhood of the odds of 1 in 10,000 that it could be random, then it might become more significant.
Ben made a link to a paper that he analyzed in order to come to his conclusions. I'm going to link to it here, mainly so that non-scientists reading this blog (perhaps most of you) can experience the interesting sensation of reading something in your native tongue that is completely incomprehensible. I believe the gist of it has to do with the fact that since the Higgs is so fleeting, it really can be detected only by what it leaves behind after it disappears, sort of like trying to identify who was at a party by sniffing the lingering smell of perfume the next morning. This paper is trying to make the case that this particular lingering smell belongs to the Higgs, even though it's a different smell than what people have been looking for. Did you know that smells are described in words such as "note" and "timbre" and "pitch?" Some smells are considered heavy, some light --- it sounds like the Higgs perfume this article was searching for was "pitched" light, with perhaps a fruity finish, with notes of lavender and lilac, and the Higgs perfume the Tevatron is searching for is pitched low, with a rooty, musty aroma, with notes of chocolate and leather.
Thinking of the Higgs boson as a perfume-wearing party patron is what happens when you turn non-scientists loose on things they don't fully understand, but greatly admire. Any scientists reading this, 1. please accept my apologies and 2. write in and correct the madness.
Yesterday she sent along something that made me sit up in my chair and blink, cup of coffee in my hand. The article, from The New Scientist, was entitled "Fleeting Particle has Shades of Higgs." If that wasn't enough, the subhead really got my attention:
"The world's most wanted particle, the Higgs, may have already appeared under our very noses without anyone noticing."
Ulp. Huh?
What's more, the article was saying that someone named German Valencia, working at Iowa State University, was re-analyzing data already taken from Fermilab (!) from 1997-1999.
I'll just paste in the article here:
The world's most wanted particle, the Higgs, may have already appeared under our very noses without anyone noticing.
The hypothetical Higgs boson, which is thought to give all other particles their mass, was first proposed in the 1960s as part of the standard model of particle physics. Other models known as "supersymmetric" theories, which posit a heavy counterpart for every particle in the standard model, predict the existence of many different Higgs bosons, each with a different mass. It is the lightest one of these that may have already been produced, according to physicist German Valencia at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.
Valencia and colleagues re-analysed data collected between 1997 and 1999 by the HyperCP experiment at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. HyperCP was designed to monitor the decay of exotic particles in order to understand why the universe is filled with matter rather than antimatter. Valencia's team focused on the decay of a particle known as sigma into a proton, a muon and an antimuon . According to the standard model, the muon-antimuon pair should have energies that lie between 210 and 240 megaelectronvolts (MeV). But in the three events seen by the HyperCP experiment, they always had the same energy of 214 MeV.
Calculations using the standard model show that the probability of three decay events all generating a muon- antimuon pair with the same energy is about 0.008. "That's pretty low," says Valencia.
A more likely possibility, he says, is that the sigma decayed to a proton and another intermediate particle with a mass of 214 MeV. This intermediate particle then decayed into the muon-antimuon pair, fixing the pair's energy at that value. So what was that mystery particle? The Iowa team's calculations suggest it could be the lightest Higgs boson predicted by one theory of supersymmetry (www.arxiv.org/hep-ph/0610362 ).
"We were obviously very excited that the conditions matched the lightest Higgs," says Valencia. "But it's easy to say 'this could be the Higgs'. The tough part is explaining why this Higgs hasn't popped up in other particle physics accelerators."
To address this, the team calculated the probability of the light Higgs being produced from the decay of particles such as kaons and B-mesons, which have been widely studied at accelerator experiments, including those at CERN in Switzerland and SLAC in California. They found that the nature of the interaction of the Higgs with those particles made the production of the light Higgs highly unlikely.
Dan Kaplan, a member of the HyperCP collaboration at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, which was not intended to help search for the Higgs, is intrigued. However, he says that more work is needed to confirm the claim. Unfortunately, the HyperCP experiment cannot be repeated, because the proton beam used in the experiment has been shut down. "Three events aren't enough to get them to start it up again, so there's zero chance of rerunning the experiment," says Kaplan.
Another possibility is to re-analyse the old HyperCP data for overlooked decay processes, including any that might rule out the Higgs. Kaplan says, "I'm inspired to suggest to my colleagues that we look into this data again."
Valencia hopes that the Large Hadron collider being built at CERN will look for the production of the light Higgs through a number of processes that his team has described. "We hope our results will inspire new searches to confirm or refute that this is the Higgs," he says.
At this point I started to get a little suspicious. We've been interviewing no less than 10 experimental and theoretical physicists working AT Fermilab, not somewhere in Iowa, and I figured that if there was any sniff of the Higgs in previous data they would probably know something about it. So after writing back to Monica I sent of the following message to Rob Roser, John Conway, Robin Erbacher, Ben Kilminster, and Mark Oreglia (familiar names to my regular readers), all experimental physicists working at Fermilab except Dr. Oreglia, who was our first contact and who teaches at the University of Chicago.
Interestingly, my email started up a little mini-conference online between these five. Rob wrote back first, saying he hadn't read this article. Robin said the same thing. Then Ben asked if someone could send the article around. Mark said he hadn't heard of it, which made him suspect it was not sensational news. He found the article and sent it around, and asked the others how to explain to us, the filmmakers, why they don't "jump up and down when they see an article like this!" He gave a quick answer: the article mentioned only 3 events, which is very underwhelming in the world of science (in an earlier post somewhere I mention the fact that scientists hate exceptions and love trends). Then he goes on to say the schema in the paper sounds a bit contrived.
Then Ben chimed in to say that "First of all, this Higgs is not the one we are looking for." He goes on to say that the group who wrote this paper is describing a Higgs that would result from a model of the universe that there is no evidence for, instead of from the model that everyone else uses (the Standard Model). This Higgs, the one from the paper, would have a mass 500 times smaller than the one they are looking for at the Tevatron. In short, from what I can understand from Ben's reply, is that the "evidence" of this Higgs could actually exist well within the margins of experimentation. Almost as though it were part of a "plus or minus 1%" that you might expect from very complicated mathmatical figuring. Turns out that the possibility of this result just occuring without any meaning at all are 1 in 100. His conclusion is that it's not convincing, and is merely a curiosity that should be studied more. When it gets in the neighborhood of the odds of 1 in 10,000 that it could be random, then it might become more significant.
Ben made a link to a paper that he analyzed in order to come to his conclusions. I'm going to link to it here, mainly so that non-scientists reading this blog (perhaps most of you) can experience the interesting sensation of reading something in your native tongue that is completely incomprehensible. I believe the gist of it has to do with the fact that since the Higgs is so fleeting, it really can be detected only by what it leaves behind after it disappears, sort of like trying to identify who was at a party by sniffing the lingering smell of perfume the next morning. This paper is trying to make the case that this particular lingering smell belongs to the Higgs, even though it's a different smell than what people have been looking for. Did you know that smells are described in words such as "note" and "timbre" and "pitch?" Some smells are considered heavy, some light --- it sounds like the Higgs perfume this article was searching for was "pitched" light, with perhaps a fruity finish, with notes of lavender and lilac, and the Higgs perfume the Tevatron is searching for is pitched low, with a rooty, musty aroma, with notes of chocolate and leather.
Thinking of the Higgs boson as a perfume-wearing party patron is what happens when you turn non-scientists loose on things they don't fully understand, but greatly admire. Any scientists reading this, 1. please accept my apologies and 2. write in and correct the madness.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Wondering where I've gone?
Loyal readers --- forgive my lack of proliferation of late. I have switched jobs, and am now teaching full time at Northwestern University (very exciting for me). Getting together three classes from scratch has been a little like re-inventing the wheel three times over. And I've been finishing up a short fiction film called Galileo's Grave that Andrew, Stefani and I shot in the summer. I've been doing sound design and supervising color transfer, etc. etc. for that. Between the two of those things, The Atom Smashers has taken something of a hiatus the last month or so. But Monica and I are meeting soon to discuss strategy, we've been attending some seminars on board development and fundraising, and we are all very eager to jump back in and start editing this sucker. In addition, look for a new and beautiful website soon at our address (www.137films.org).
Once things settle down some, I'll be back with more updates. Sorry for the long delay!
Best,
cb
Once things settle down some, I'll be back with more updates. Sorry for the long delay!
Best,
cb
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Status Report
So, where are we?
As I mentioned in the last post, we came back from New York almost done with filming. We then got one more interview: Ben Kilminster (the rollerblading, rock band-singing experimental physicist) presented his Higgs results. He had done some pretty important work in the Higgs area, and so we interviewed him and filmed him doing a "practice talk" before presenting the results (actually, I was out of town, and I think it's the only interview I've missed...).
That interview marked our official end of production. We've now officially moved into "Post-production."
Woohoo!
Having said that, there may be an interview here or there that we determine we need once we get into editing, and we can always break out the camera again to get it on tape.
But what's happening now? See here for a summary of the post production phase. We've completed step 1 (digitizing the footage), and (thanks to some terrific help from our interns Cate, Jamie, Robert, and Caleb) we are narrowing in on step 2 (logging the footage). We've also made a dent in step 3 (transcribing the interviews), but still have a ways to go. I'd like to begin step 4 (the paper edit) by the beginning of October, and step 6 (beginning the edit) by November. Step 7, the first deadline (rough cut) is tentatively slated for March.
In addition, other things happen more or less continually --- we applied for another grant recently, and several more are upcoming. We're having a fundraiser Wednesday, and Andrew is going to unveil a much-needed overhaul of our website soon. And we just took a group photo last night... as soon as I get a copy from Stef I'll post it!
As I mentioned in the last post, we came back from New York almost done with filming. We then got one more interview: Ben Kilminster (the rollerblading, rock band-singing experimental physicist) presented his Higgs results. He had done some pretty important work in the Higgs area, and so we interviewed him and filmed him doing a "practice talk" before presenting the results (actually, I was out of town, and I think it's the only interview I've missed...).
That interview marked our official end of production. We've now officially moved into "Post-production."
Woohoo!
Having said that, there may be an interview here or there that we determine we need once we get into editing, and we can always break out the camera again to get it on tape.
But what's happening now? See here for a summary of the post production phase. We've completed step 1 (digitizing the footage), and (thanks to some terrific help from our interns Cate, Jamie, Robert, and Caleb) we are narrowing in on step 2 (logging the footage). We've also made a dent in step 3 (transcribing the interviews), but still have a ways to go. I'd like to begin step 4 (the paper edit) by the beginning of October, and step 6 (beginning the edit) by November. Step 7, the first deadline (rough cut) is tentatively slated for March.
In addition, other things happen more or less continually --- we applied for another grant recently, and several more are upcoming. We're having a fundraiser Wednesday, and Andrew is going to unveil a much-needed overhaul of our website soon. And we just took a group photo last night... as soon as I get a copy from Stef I'll post it!
Monday, August 28, 2006
East Coast Trip part four
OK, I swear this won't turn into a serial soap opera.
Sometimes you find yourself in situations you don't expect due to circumstances outside your control. For example: Andrew's brother GENEROUSLY donated our rental car. In fact, he upgraded us to a Jeep Grand Wagoneer because we had three people and a bunch of gear. This same brother also allowed us to stay at his very large house in a suburb of DC. One morning, we were really hungry and needed some coffee. I got some directions and headed out to get the group some morning supplies. On the way back I had to make a quick phone call. Suddenly I had to stop and take stock of my situation. I was an SUV-drivin,' Starbucks drinkin', cell-phone talkin' guy wearing sunglasses. I rushed home and took a shower.
So, we left Wednesday evening for New York. We took one of those commuter planes, which normally make me crazy. But this one was pretty smooth. Once we were in the clouds I got out the video camera and got some nice shots to keep myself distracted, and the flight attendant came over and started giving me tips about how to get the best footage of the city when on final approach, such as which side of the plane to shoot from, etc. When she gave the "electronic devices must now be turned off" announcement, she turned a blind eye and let me keep filming.
Luke had our New York accomodations lined up, and after a brief bit of confusion about our driver (we weren't using a taxi, but rather a driving service, which is pretty popular in New York. They're a little cheaper, or sometimes a little more expensive, but you can just call and someone will be around to pick you up. It's a little less hectic than hailing a cab) we made it to our pad for the next two nights: a penthouse apartment in Brooklyn, with a 500 square-foot rooftop balcony that had an amazing view of all of Manhattan. We had a great time at Scott's place. He's a fabric designer, and he gave us a showing of his most recent designs, right after a huge dinner of Jamaican chicken from the place down the street called "The Islands."
Our interview with Dennis Overbye was not confirmed, but was planned for Friday morning. He had just arrived back from China, and we hadn't been in contact in weeks, and weren't 100% sure he still remembered us. I had called and left messages, but we just didn't know anything. Monica was flying in for that interview, and if he wasn't able to do it or had forgotten then her trip (and the 2nd half of ours) would be for nothing. In the meantime, this being Thursday, we had a day to kill. Andrew and Luke unfortunately had free lance work that kept them busy, so I was on my own. I went to the American Museum of Natural History, which was incredible, and then took myself down to Coney Island to see the last of a great institution before it gets the seedy amusement park equivalent of a gut rehab. It was cold, windy, full of trash, and pulsing with hip hop and R&B music. Carny rides whipped screaming kids and people around rusting rides, and tired hawkers tried to convince people to play their games and spend money. One guy was flatly intoning his shtick into a microphone as I walked down the boardwalk, trying to intice the curious or bored with the promise that they could "shoot a live target with a paintball gun. That's right, folks, shoot an actual, living, breathing human being with a paintball gun." I couldn't help but wonder about the poor sucker they found to stand up there, probably in some kind of mildewed foam suit and a football helmet, and get hit with paintballs.
But I got a call from Dennis Overbye and had to duck behind a building to avoid screaming sirens and hawkers. He sounded a little tired from jetlag, and asked "now, what are you interviewing me about?" but generally seemed game.
The next morning I met Monica outside the office of the New York Times in Manhattan and we spent an hour with a cup of coffee planning the interview. Luke and Andrew got stuck in traffic with the gear and were nearly an hour late, but we managed to race up to the conference room for the interview. After a hurried set up, we started.
Dennis was good, but seemed a little tired. He didn't have the same kind of spark that Natalie Angier and Kei Koizumi did, and his "presentation" was a little slow. It didn't make for exactly riveting footage, but he threw us some curves that should keep things interesting. For example, contrary to our other interviews, when asked about Fermilab closing and CERN opening, he shrugged and said "as long as the science happens, it really doesn't matter where." He was pretty uninterested in who did what where, and wasn't even particularly concerned about the trend in US science spending. "If CERN and the Europeans are willing to spend the money," he said, "maybe they should get the discoveries." It will be nice to throw that notion into the mix as well. It will give the viewer a more complex bite to chew on.
His eyes did light up when he discussed a recent trip to Fermilab. He mentioned the CDF detector building, where we have spent so much time, and referred to the huge pieces of equipment as "gigantic brightly-colored toys, looking like a giant child had been playing with them and left them out." It's true --- for some reason, even though the equipment they construct there at Fermilab (some of it for CERN, ironically enough) is incredibly complicated, it is usually housed in a simple, enormous tube or rectangle, and is almost always painted bright orange or blue.
We had to high-tail it out of the New York Times building, into our "driver's" car, and out of Manhattan to the airport in Queens. Then it was back to Chicago where Andrew and I realized somehow we had each forgotten to make a note of where we parked my car (it WAS 4:30 am when we parked, after all), but due to his terrific spatial memory we found it and dazedly went our separate ways, with five more hours of excellent footage in the can. With our total at about 114 hours, we were just about done shooting.
Sometimes you find yourself in situations you don't expect due to circumstances outside your control. For example: Andrew's brother GENEROUSLY donated our rental car. In fact, he upgraded us to a Jeep Grand Wagoneer because we had three people and a bunch of gear. This same brother also allowed us to stay at his very large house in a suburb of DC. One morning, we were really hungry and needed some coffee. I got some directions and headed out to get the group some morning supplies. On the way back I had to make a quick phone call. Suddenly I had to stop and take stock of my situation. I was an SUV-drivin,' Starbucks drinkin', cell-phone talkin' guy wearing sunglasses. I rushed home and took a shower.
So, we left Wednesday evening for New York. We took one of those commuter planes, which normally make me crazy. But this one was pretty smooth. Once we were in the clouds I got out the video camera and got some nice shots to keep myself distracted, and the flight attendant came over and started giving me tips about how to get the best footage of the city when on final approach, such as which side of the plane to shoot from, etc. When she gave the "electronic devices must now be turned off" announcement, she turned a blind eye and let me keep filming.
Luke had our New York accomodations lined up, and after a brief bit of confusion about our driver (we weren't using a taxi, but rather a driving service, which is pretty popular in New York. They're a little cheaper, or sometimes a little more expensive, but you can just call and someone will be around to pick you up. It's a little less hectic than hailing a cab) we made it to our pad for the next two nights: a penthouse apartment in Brooklyn, with a 500 square-foot rooftop balcony that had an amazing view of all of Manhattan. We had a great time at Scott's place. He's a fabric designer, and he gave us a showing of his most recent designs, right after a huge dinner of Jamaican chicken from the place down the street called "The Islands."
Our interview with Dennis Overbye was not confirmed, but was planned for Friday morning. He had just arrived back from China, and we hadn't been in contact in weeks, and weren't 100% sure he still remembered us. I had called and left messages, but we just didn't know anything. Monica was flying in for that interview, and if he wasn't able to do it or had forgotten then her trip (and the 2nd half of ours) would be for nothing. In the meantime, this being Thursday, we had a day to kill. Andrew and Luke unfortunately had free lance work that kept them busy, so I was on my own. I went to the American Museum of Natural History, which was incredible, and then took myself down to Coney Island to see the last of a great institution before it gets the seedy amusement park equivalent of a gut rehab. It was cold, windy, full of trash, and pulsing with hip hop and R&B music. Carny rides whipped screaming kids and people around rusting rides, and tired hawkers tried to convince people to play their games and spend money. One guy was flatly intoning his shtick into a microphone as I walked down the boardwalk, trying to intice the curious or bored with the promise that they could "shoot a live target with a paintball gun. That's right, folks, shoot an actual, living, breathing human being with a paintball gun." I couldn't help but wonder about the poor sucker they found to stand up there, probably in some kind of mildewed foam suit and a football helmet, and get hit with paintballs.
But I got a call from Dennis Overbye and had to duck behind a building to avoid screaming sirens and hawkers. He sounded a little tired from jetlag, and asked "now, what are you interviewing me about?" but generally seemed game.
The next morning I met Monica outside the office of the New York Times in Manhattan and we spent an hour with a cup of coffee planning the interview. Luke and Andrew got stuck in traffic with the gear and were nearly an hour late, but we managed to race up to the conference room for the interview. After a hurried set up, we started.
Dennis was good, but seemed a little tired. He didn't have the same kind of spark that Natalie Angier and Kei Koizumi did, and his "presentation" was a little slow. It didn't make for exactly riveting footage, but he threw us some curves that should keep things interesting. For example, contrary to our other interviews, when asked about Fermilab closing and CERN opening, he shrugged and said "as long as the science happens, it really doesn't matter where." He was pretty uninterested in who did what where, and wasn't even particularly concerned about the trend in US science spending. "If CERN and the Europeans are willing to spend the money," he said, "maybe they should get the discoveries." It will be nice to throw that notion into the mix as well. It will give the viewer a more complex bite to chew on.
His eyes did light up when he discussed a recent trip to Fermilab. He mentioned the CDF detector building, where we have spent so much time, and referred to the huge pieces of equipment as "gigantic brightly-colored toys, looking like a giant child had been playing with them and left them out." It's true --- for some reason, even though the equipment they construct there at Fermilab (some of it for CERN, ironically enough) is incredibly complicated, it is usually housed in a simple, enormous tube or rectangle, and is almost always painted bright orange or blue.
We had to high-tail it out of the New York Times building, into our "driver's" car, and out of Manhattan to the airport in Queens. Then it was back to Chicago where Andrew and I realized somehow we had each forgotten to make a note of where we parked my car (it WAS 4:30 am when we parked, after all), but due to his terrific spatial memory we found it and dazedly went our separate ways, with five more hours of excellent footage in the can. With our total at about 114 hours, we were just about done shooting.
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