With the help of a friend of mine, I was finally able to watch the Independent Lens program “The Atom Smashers”. The thoughts of this friend, Joe, are available on his blog [1].
Jodi and I watched the program together. We both felt the same thing – that the amazing part of this was watching colleagues and friends start out so optimistic about the quest for the Higgs. Under the relentless tenaciousness of Nature and the withering pressure of shrinking U.S. science budgets, each of the interviewees in the film slowly loses their grip on hope.
What the film doesn’t end with, the Hollywood icing on the whole story, is that with all the interviewees making statements about CERN being the future, exactly the same conspiracy of Nature kept the LHC from starting as planned. The accident at CERN puts the Tevatron back in the center of the spotlight of the quest for the Higgs.
The real ending of this story is much different from the end of this film. LHC goes online in September, presumably about the time the film was cut. Less than a month later, the accident occurs and shuts down the accelerator. Fermilab finds itself at the center of a fresh round of questions. How big a dataset will they close-out in the next year? Could they run longer? Will a U.S. government in transition drop the ball on funding basic science, and will Fermilab get caught in the mess? Could the Tevatron get a fresh boost, both of money and talent, to go out with a bang and not the whimper that the film implied?
Some experiments go out with a whimper. Some with a bang. The hollywood ending leaves us with the simple question: which will it be? If I know my colleagues on the Tevatron . . .
BANG.
[1] http://crazyphysicsnerd.blogspot.com/2008/12/atom-smashers.html
