MOVIES: Particle Fever
May. 28th, 2014 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dewlineI saw that particular documentary at the Bytowne today after attending to research and job-hunt chores earlier in the day. If you're at all familiar with the history of the hunt for the Higgs particle, you'll already know what the movie is partly about. The rest of it is about a half-dozen members of the research community that gathered around the project at CERN from 2007 to 2012.
I know this was a Big Damn Deal. It was big enough for Anna Maria Tremonti to devote air time on The Current to it on a couple of occasions, in addition to whatever Bob McDonald was doing for Quirks and Quarks.
So the movie gave me a bit of additional context and human dimension to the whole thing, which I deeply appreciate. It does leave me with a bit of a quandary, and it may take some of you with more physics knowledge than I've got on me at the moment to work through: the discovery of the Higgs seems to have left a couple of the researchers with a bit of a quandary as to what the fact of its existence and the details of it further add up to. Mainly, this "supersymmetry vs. multiverse" argument.
I'm unsure as to why it's necessary for one of these concepts to win out over the other.
Possibly, it's because I've read too many comic books where multiverses were part of the standing menu of the super-hero genre. In fact, you could call that diagnosis of my thinking a certainty. Add in the influence of Mark Gruenwald's work on the Marvel Universe Handbook, particularly his devotion to making the pseudo-science of Marvel fit - however roughly - with the known science of the day, and you can guess the rest of it.
But if anyone is willing to try to answer that "why does one concept have to win" thing...?
I know this was a Big Damn Deal. It was big enough for Anna Maria Tremonti to devote air time on The Current to it on a couple of occasions, in addition to whatever Bob McDonald was doing for Quirks and Quarks.
So the movie gave me a bit of additional context and human dimension to the whole thing, which I deeply appreciate. It does leave me with a bit of a quandary, and it may take some of you with more physics knowledge than I've got on me at the moment to work through: the discovery of the Higgs seems to have left a couple of the researchers with a bit of a quandary as to what the fact of its existence and the details of it further add up to. Mainly, this "supersymmetry vs. multiverse" argument.
I'm unsure as to why it's necessary for one of these concepts to win out over the other.
Possibly, it's because I've read too many comic books where multiverses were part of the standing menu of the super-hero genre. In fact, you could call that diagnosis of my thinking a certainty. Add in the influence of Mark Gruenwald's work on the Marvel Universe Handbook, particularly his devotion to making the pseudo-science of Marvel fit - however roughly - with the known science of the day, and you can guess the rest of it.
But if anyone is willing to try to answer that "why does one concept have to win" thing...?
