My father asked me today, right before I took a jog, “Did you see that program called ‘The Next Big Bang’? Was it any good? I didn’t see it.”
What program? I did some digging on the net, and found out that on Sept. 9 The History Channel aired (just once) a 1 hour documentary on the 40-year history leading up to the turn on of the LHC. It was called “Next Big Bang”, and it re-airs this Saturday at 5 pm on History, not even weekend primetime.
History [1] describes the program as follows:
After 40 years of planning and construction, the biggest science
experiment in history is ready to be tested. The “Large Hadron
Collider” is an experiment created by the greatest minds in physics. It
cost $10 billion and its resulting data has the potential to explain
why we and the Universe exist. Their idea is to smash protons towards
one another at the speed of light, trying to mimic what happened in the
milliseconds after The Big Bang. Viewers will go on an amazing journey
involving the struggles to plan and build the LHC, how it was
constructed and what are its mechanics. Explore the future of what’s
possible through the geniuses of today.
The only advertising I should have seen for this was SLAC Today [2], but I missed that when the article appeared. Did anybody see this program, or at least hear about it outside of venues like “SLAC Today”? Was it any good?
The film creator himself complained in a blog post that History under-advertised the program, and he was surprised that it didn’t air multiple times on the day the LHC circulated protons [3].
I hope to catch it Saturday, but I’d love to hear some peer reviews before I get to dig into it.
I guess more people wanted to urban miners dig under cities, sketchy evidence about ancient computers, bloodsports held on the site of what is today New York, , and, of course, the history of aluminum.
[1] http://www.history.com/shows.do?episodeId=276858&action=detail
[2] http://today.slac.stanford.edu/a/2008/09-09.htm
[3] http://physicsandphysicists.blogspot.com/2008/09/next-big-bang.html
