Fermilab...a new documentary film

"Fermilab documentary offers inside look"

A new documentary about the people and science of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is now available on YouTube.

by

Andre Salles

February 12, 2013

Symmetry

When Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross were commissioned to direct a new documentary about Fermilab, they had a couple of questions. The most important one, Ross says, was this: Should the movie be a standard informational video, or should it tell a story about the lab and its people?

Focus on the people and tell the story, said Judy Jackson, former head of the Office of Communication. And that's when Brown and Ross started getting excited about the idea.

The resulting film, shot over two years in and around the laboratory, is called "Fermilab: Science at Work." Over its 40 minutes, it follows 10 of the laboratory's scientists, giving viewers an inside look at their work (and sometimes, home) lives. But that's not to say that the film skimps on the science. It features the installation of part of the MINERvA detector, the construction of the Dark Energy Camera and an animated look at the configuration of Fermilab's accelerator complex.

Above all, the film puts forth a passionate argument in favor of what Brown calls "curiosity-driven science." Finding the necessary funding for basic research is difficult, Brown says, but there's immense value there. As artists, he says, he and Ross could relate.

Brown and Ross are no strangers to the ongoing conversation about fundamental research. As partners in the Chicago-based 137 Films, they previously co-directed "The Atom Smashers," a 2008 PBS film documenting Fermilab's efforts to find the Higgs boson. They worked for four years on that film, shooting extensively at Fermilab, so they were already familiar with the lab when it came time to roll cameras on this new documentary.

"We did feel like Fermilab was home to us," Ross says. "We came in as insiders. We knew Fermilab, we understood it."

In selecting subjects for the film, Brown and Ross say they were looking for a mix of women and men of different ages, backgrounds and interests. It was not an easy task, but the 10 they chose—Brendan Casey, Mary Convery, Brenna Flaugher, Bonnie Fleming, Deborah Harris, Craig Hogan, Denton Morris, David Schmitz, Aron Soha and Herman White—all proved compelling, Ross says.

Shooting began in the summer of 2010. Brown and Ross made several appointments with each of the scientists, following them as they worked on experiments and observing some of them at home. The film opens at Casey's house as he and his family get ready to start their day, and Brown recalls with a laugh that Casey had neglected to tell his wife that the camera crew would be there that day.

"His wife came down the stairs in her pajamas and gave him an icy glare," Brown chuckles. "She was a good sport about it."

Since their earlier effort "The Atom Smashers" focused on the high-energy physics of the Tevatron, they were less familiar with the Intensity Frontier and Cosmic Frontier experiments they explored for "Science at Work," Brown and Ross say. The film features the lab's slate of neutrino experiments as well as the Dark Energy Camera.

The filmmakers also got the chance to shoot in the Large Hadron Collider Remote Operations Center for the first time and to observe the real-time video link between Fermilab and CERN in Switzerland.

Some of the most striking sections of the film don't feature people at all—they're animations by Seattle-based artist Luke Haddock, illuminating scientific concepts in visual ways. In one section, cartoon drawings of ice cream trucks are used to explain neutrino oscillations. In another, a scale model of the Fermilab site becomes an animated diagram of the new accelerator complex.

Filming wrapped in the first half of 2012, and after six months of editing, the movie was complete. Ross says she enjoyed shooting at a place with such strong aesthetics, noting founding director Robert Wilson's combined interests in science and art. Fermilab, she says, "is a special place."

And Brown says the people of Fermilab made the shoot a special one.

"We never met a person who wasn't thrilled to be there at all times," Brown says. "There is no one who just shows up and clocks in. Everyone's excited to be there."

Science at Work

Fermilab home page

Fermilab [Wikipedia]

Fermilab--history

Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier and Megascience

by

Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall

ISBN-10: 0226346234
ISBN-13: 978-0226346236

"A story of the people who shaped Fermilab"

April 21st, 2009

Symmetry

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, probes the largest questions in the universe by looking at the world’s smallest particles. But all that ground-breaking science doesn’t occur in a cultural vacuum. Discoveries have evolved amidst a back story of people, politics, and even art.

With the release of a new book Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier and Megascience, three women who have spent years at the flagship laboratory for American high-energy particle physics, provide a historical view of how big science happens. They also reveal some of the little known facts surrounding the "laboratory on the prairie", including what the tall sculpture in the middle of the pond in front of Wilson Hall represents and why Fermilab’s mailing address is Batavia instead of Warrenville.

The book is a must-read for science and Illinois history buffs as well as anyone who has ever worked at or visited Fermilab. This first widely published history of Fermilab gains its strength from the close ties its authors have with the laboratory.

Adrienne Kolb has been an archivist at Fermilab for 25 years; Lillian Hoddeson is Fermilab's historian and a history of science professor at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign; and Catherine Westfall wrote her PhD dissertation on Fermilab and is currently a visiting history professor at Michigan State University.

Their comprehensive history of Fermilab is largely told through portraits of the two leaders who have most shaped the institution: Robert Rathbun Wilson, the first director; and his successor, Leon Lederman. The authors write: "While Wilson's image was based on his personae as pioneer, engineer and Renaissance man; Lederman's rested on his all-embracing passion for physics."

The authors' human-interest angle, which focuses on the people who shaped Fermilab through 1998, will interest general readers and specialists alike. The book is rich with historical and scientific details, and it includes many citations from interviews and collected oral histories, which make for a very lively account.

The authors frame the book around the three themes mentioned in the sub-title: Physics, the Frontier and Megascience. The US government, through the Department of Energy’s predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, appointed Wilson to lead the National Accelerator Laboratory in 1967. At this time, the goal for particle physics was to move significantly beyond the 30 GeV energy threshold being examined by Brookhaven National Laboratory and CERN, the European particle physics laboratory located in Switzerland.

Wilson wanted to take his field even further with an accelerator designed to reach 500 GeV. To highlight that, Fermilab lore has it, Wilson asked post offices in towns surrounding Fermilab to give him a Post Office Box number 500 for the laboratory. Batavia was the only town with such a high number, so the laboratory chose a Batavia mailing address.

The second part of the book, "A New Frontier on the Illinois Prairie," discusses how Wilson crafted Fermilab with an eye to his own upbringing on the plains of Wyoming. Fermilab was established on farmland that would become one of the largest restored native prairies in the United States. In addition to Wilson’s efforts to plant hundreds of trees and shrubs, he also brought buffalo to Fermilab to highlight the connection between the area’s frontier past and laboratory's goal to be on the frontier of science.

Under Wilson's tenure, Fermilab turned on its 200 GeV proton accelerator, the Main Ring, in 1972.

Wilson also contributed to the aesthetics of Fermilab. One of his contributions to the sculptures dotting the site is the steel obelisk in the pond in front of Wilson Hall. He called it "Acqua alle Funi," which in Italian means "water to the ropes." That phrase was a rallying cry in 16th century Rome when workers raised an obelisk to its vertical height at St. Peter's Square, using ropes that needed water to work properly. At Fermilab, it became the rallying cry during the final months of construction of the main accelerator ring, which is surrounded by water used to cool magnets heated up by particles pushed to ever faster speeds.

In 1978, Wilson left the directorship to Leon Lederman, a physics professor at Columbia University. The third part of the book, "The Road to Megascience," discusses the accomplishments during Lederman's tenure. According to the authors, the "unabashedly romantic" leader often said: "The life of a physicist is filled with anxiety, pain, hardship, tension, attacks of hopelessness, depression and discouragement. But that the epiphanies made it all worthwhile."

Under Lederman's leadership, Fermilab blossomed with a number of projects: superconducting magnets, the 1000 GeV Tevatron, and two large detector groups, CDF and DZero. He also ushered Fermilab into greater international collaboration and renown. "Lederman’s efforts made Fermilab an apt home for a megascience that would establish Fermilab at the frontiers of science for decades to come," the authors write.

Lederman also made Fermilab feel more like a home to scientists from all over the world. He created the Chez Leon restaurant and the children’s center. He also started a program for high school students called Saturday Morning Physics.

The book does not skirt over the many tensions, mistakes, and disappointments Fermilab has known, nor the scientific details of the institution’s main endeavors. Physicists and other scientists would especially enjoy reading about the various ups and downs in experiments that predated their own.

For everyone else, the book is an engaging read and a real insight into one of the world’s most renowned physics institutions.


Σπυροπούλου [Maria Spiropulu]--physicist

"And in this corner...Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory"

Deceased--Frank Shoemaker

Dirty Al's Surplus could be in "hog heaven"

Fermilab vs CERN--clash of atomic titans

"God particle"/Higgs boson--knowledge of the universe

Hercule Poirot, et. al. at Fermilab

Physicist's license plates

SMACKDOWN for "God Particle"

"The Atom Smashers"--eccentric

"The Atom Smashers"--tonight on PBS

World Year of Physics 2005

SMACKDOWN for "God Particle"

Only a mother of a physicist could love this? The stalled and patient participants are fighting for supremacy in the discovery of the Higgs Boson [God Particle].

"God's Broken Machine"

As Europe makes repairs to its shiny new particle accelerator, U.S. rivals prepare to steal the prize.

by

Fred Guterl and William Underhill

March 7th, 2009

NEWSWEEK

Investors aren't the only ones feeling a pit in their stomachs lately. Physicists at the world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, are seeing their dreams of Nobel Prizes go down the drain along with the Dow. The collider was sold to the European public as the best chance of discovering a piece of subatomic debris so important to our understanding of the universe that it's been dubbed the "God Particle." Less than a month after scientists flipped the switch on the new machine back in September, however, it broke down. Repairs will take a year.

The wait itself isn't so bad—particle physicists are used to biding their time while technicians fix their big, delicate machines. Now, though, a U.S. rival seems to have exploited the lull by staging a last-minute comeback, threatening to leapfrog the Europeans to the prize. This week scientists at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, will announce new data that not only narrows the gap between them and the coveted God Particle, but also suggests that the LHC may not be particularly well placed to make the discovery at all. The finding is a public-relations blow to the LHC and tarnishes Europe's newly burnished image as a leader in Big Science.

The problem is partly of the physicists' own making. The LHC, completed last year at a cost of €3 billion, triggered an American-style media blitz. The BBC devoted an entire day of radio programs to the project. The world's press ran headlines like "Mankind's Greatest Experiment," "Hunt Begins for Secrets of the Universe" and "The Shot Heard Round the Universe." (NEWSWEEK put the collider on its cover, too.) One account described the LHC itself as the "God Machine."

Perhaps the biggest mistake was in creating such high expectations for what is only one of many goals, though arguably the most important: to discover the Higgs boson (a.k.a. the God Particle). Whether the Higgs exists goes to the heart of particle physics—if there's no Higgs, the "standard model" of the universe that physicists have been honing for a half century would need major revision. Finding out entails sending protons around a magnetic racetrack and then smashing them into one another at high energies. The LHC, the argument went, is the only machine big enough to reach the energies needed to make the Higgs (if it exists) appear.

The only problem with that story is that it might not be entirely true. The standard model predicts that the Higgs will fall within a range of energies—from 114 giga-electron-volts to 185 GeV. The LHC is, without question, master of the upper portion of that range. Using it to hunt the Higgs at the lower energies, however, would be like shooting quail with a cruise missile. Fermilab's smaller Tevatron collider, it turns out, may be better suited. The Higgs, the new Fermilab data show, does not exist for a portion of the upper range, putting it in the Tevatron's cross hairs and suggesting that the LHC may be more peripheral to the search than previously thought. "We've made their jobs a little bit harder," says Fermilab physicist Dmitry Denisov, "because we've excluded the region they're good at."

European scientists are putting a brave face on the news. They emphasize all the other things the LHC is expected to do, such as uncovering evidence of higher dimensions and the mysterious "dark matter" thought to make up 70 percent of the universe. "Seeing the Higgs boson is really a small part of the game," says Sergio Bertolucci, the LHC's director of research and computing. If the Higgs turns out not to exist, LHC data will help in figuring out why not. If Americans are first to find the Higgs, the LHC will help confirm the discovery and embellish it with detail.

Fermilab scientists, in their magnanimity, are eager to agree. "We could not compete with LHC," says Denisov. "Our detectors aren't as modern or complex as LHC's. But to be able to reach this unexplored region of the universe first is, of course, creating a lot of excitement." The findings come as a much-needed morale boost in Batavia. The Bush administration had cut Fermilab's budget, creating a brain drain to Geneva. Now the lab's 900 scientists have begun to feel young again. Cars can be seen in the parking lots on Saturday nights as researchers pore over experimental data. In the past four months, 30 new Ph.D. students have signed on to help with the research—an increase of 25 percent. "That really helps us," says Denisov.

Missing the Higgs boson would be a setback not only to the LHC, but it also might lower Europe's appetite for big, expensive scientific projects that don't have direct relevance to pressing problems like climate change. For the time being, of course, the poor economy has turned all spending into stimulus. When the crisis settles and the bills come due, however, the physicists in Geneva might want to have some dark matter or a few extra dimensions to show for their efforts.

Deceased--Frank Shoemaker

Princeton University

Frank Shoemaker
1923 to February 11th, 2009

"Frank Shoemaker, leading high-energy physicist, dies"

by

Kitta MacPherson

March 2nd, 2009

News at Princeton

Frank Shoemaker, a leader in the development of high-energy particle accelerators during a highly revelatory era for physics and a founding member of the experimental particle physics group at Princeton, has died at age 86.

Shoemaker, a professor emeritus of physics, a mentor to generations of junior faculty and graduate students, and a dedicated teacher who designed many of the University's freshman physics class demonstrations, died at Meadow Lakes in Hightstown, N.J., on Feb. 11.

He was remembered by his friends and colleagues for his technical brilliance and blunt, no-nonsense style.

"Frank possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of experimental science and used it to design novel instruments for particle physics," said A. J. Stewart Smith, Princeton's dean for research, a particle physicist and a long-term collaborator. "Generations of graduate students and faculty benefited from his unselfish, ingenious contributions to their research and enjoyed working with this remarkable man."

Though genial, Shoemaker was known for his plainspokenness. Peter Meyers, a professor of physics at Princeton who became his close friend, said that he was taken aback at first when he met Shoemaker. "He seemed very opinionated until I realized that he really did know it all," said Meyers. "Once I could see that he really wanted to help, it changed everything. You didn't bother going to the library, you asked him."

The epitome of a hands-on scientist, Shoemaker, who served on the Princeton physics faculty from 1952 until his retirement in 1989, was always building something. He led the reconstruction of the University's Palmer Cyclotron after a fire in 1952 and, in the course of his research, performed pioneering experiments on the strong focusing of particle beams. He then went on to lead the design and construction of the 3-billion-volt Princeton-Pennsylvania Accelerator, and served as associate director of the accelerator program from 1962 to 1966.

He took a year-long leave of absence from Princeton in 1968 to become the first head of the main-ring group at what would become the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory or Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., and led the design and construction of that facility's 1 kilometer radius main accelerator ring.

Returning to Princeton in 1969, Shoemaker played critical roles in Princeton experiments conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and Fermilab that provided confirmation of the new quantum chromodynamics theory of strong interactions and the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions. He served as principal investigator of the Princeton high-energy physics group from 1972 to 1985. Following his retirement from teaching in 1989, he played a major role in the Booster Neutrino Experiment, known as MiniBooNE, at Fermilab.

Last year, he became a figure of intrigue in the physics community when his name was decoded from a mysterious cryptogram mailed on a single sheet of paper to Fermilab. When translated, the first line of the code read, "Frank Shoemaker would call this noise." While Shoemaker himself was not interested in delving into the mystery, according to colleagues, rumors swirled on the Internet that the writer might be one of his former students. "It certainly seemed to be written by someone who knew him because it was so true to the spirit of Frank," Meyers said.

To a particle physicist, noise is anything a detector falsely reads as a particle or signal. Most of the rest of what has become known as the Shoemaker cryptogram has not yet been deciphered. And the author remains unknown.

Shoemaker was known as a dedicated teacher and served as director of undergraduate physics studies from 1981 to 1989. In that role, he transformed the teaching of introductory physics at Princeton, developing demonstrations to show students the actual processes they were studying in the classroom. He also conducted a popular annual demonstration for faculty and graduate students. To colleagues, many of whom had only imagined such phenomena on a theoretical level, the yearly efforts displayed a virtuosic mastery of the physical world.

He was born in Ogden, Utah, to Roy and Sarah Shoemaker. He was the second of their five sons, all of whom would go on to earn Ph.Ds. He spent his high school years in Boise, Idaho, where he met his future wife, Ruth Elizabeth Nelson. Both attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., where they were both elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Following graduation and marriage, both worked at the Radiation Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., on the development of radar for use in World War II.

After the war, Shoemaker received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and moved to Princeton to begin his long career here. He was instrumental in the design of Jadwin Hall, the University's physics building, bringing his practical bent to bear on questions of door widths in both corridors and elevators and the capacity of floors to withstand the load of heavy lab equipment.

He was active in research well after his retirement and was a familiar figure in Jadwin up until a year ago, when his health began to decline.

Shoemaker was a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of Sigma Xi. He also was awarded an honorary doctor of science by his alma mater, Whitman College, in 1978. He wrote or co-wrote more than 100 papers and articles.

In addition to physics, Shoemaker's main passions were his family, classical music, sailing and dogs. Following his retirement, he and his wife traveled extensively, visiting all 50 states and five continents.

Shoemaker was pre-deceased by his wife of 56 years, Ruth, who died in 2001. He is survived by his two daughters, Barbara Shoemaker, a 1976 Princeton graduate, and Mary Mittnacht, both of Santa Fe, N.M., and a brother, Sydney Shoemaker, of Ithaca, N.Y.

The family does not plan to have a memorial service, but has designated two organizations to receive memorial gifts: SAVE, an animal rescue organization (900 Herrontown Road, Princeton, NJ 08540, http://www.save-animals.org); and the Princeton High School Performing Arts Center and High School Music Programs (Princeton Education Foundation, P.O. Box 176, Princeton, NJ 08542, http://pefnj.org -- please specify the music programs and arts center as the purpose of any gifts).

"Pioneer researcher at Fermilab dies"

February 3rd, 2009

Fermilab Today

Frank C. Shoemaker, 86, of Hightstown, NJ, passed away on Feb. 11. He was a leader in the particle physics community and integral in the launching of Fermilab’s initial collider experiments and bison herd as well as the subsequent operation of neutrino programs.

Shoemaker was professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, where he worked 40 years and helped start the experimental particle physics group, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of Sigma Xi and of Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1968, he took a year-long leave of absence from Princeton to become the first head of the Main-Ring group at the National Accelerator Laboratory, which was to become Fermilab. He led the design and construction of that facility’s 1-km radius main accelerator ring. He also suggested the introduction of the herd of bison.

Returning to Princeton in 1969, Shoemaker played critical roles in Princeton experiments conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and at Fermilab that provided confirmation of the new quantum chromodynamics theory of strong interactions and the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions. He served as principal investigator from 1972-85. Following his retirement from teaching in 1989, he played a major role in the Booster neutrino experiment, MiniBooNE, at Fermilab, and was listed as a co-author on a paper published in 2008.

He is survived by loving daughters, Barbara Shoemaker and Mary Mittnacht, both of Santa Fe, NM, and a brother, Sydney Shoemaker, of Ithaca, NY. After nearly 57 years of marriage, his wife, Ruth Elizabeth Shoemaker, died in 2001.

The family does not plan a memorial service, but has designated two organizations to receive memorial gifts: SAVE, an animal rescue organization (900 Herrontown Rd., Princeton, NJ 08520), and the Princeton High School Performing Arts Center and High School Music Programs (Princeton Education Foundation, PO Box 176, Princeton, NJ 08542 – please specify the Music Programs and Arts Center as the purpose of any gifts).

And, Frank Shoemaker was involved in...

Hercule Poirot, et. al. at Fermilab

Fermilab's "Golden Book Collection"

Fermilab's archives have made available their "Golden Book Collection" on the history and development of their physics facility. There are eleven books with impressive authors: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Hans Bethe, and Leon M. Lederman.

"Golden Book Collection"

"The Atom Smashers"--eccentric

Now I know why they ran this so late last night. "The Atom Smashers" was a study of eccentric physicists and the race to discover the Higgs Boson--overall somewhat boring. It is a small world of theoretical physicists and the question here, especially in the light of the current economy, is the search for the ultimate particle justified at this time. It is more a matter of philosophy than science...to discover the Holy Grail of high energy physics and possibly offer an explanation of what holds the universe together. The DOE has slowly cut funds at Fermilab and other institutions as well. Money is getting tight and the wholesale search, however grand it would be, is put on the back burner for now. Of course there is the LHC...Fermilab's high-powered competitor that may well discover the Higgs Boson before Fermilab does. The cognitive battle between Fermilab and the LHC, I suppose, is a matter of pride. The search for the Higgs Boson is interesting, but what would it eventually yield?

As a side note, the expository subtitled data was intrusive, overused, and difficult to read.

"The Atom Smashers"--tonight on PBS

Fermilab

Wow, a back to back science offering from PBS. Tonight on Independent Lens is a program called "The Atom Smashers".


"The Atom Smashers"

And co-director Clayton Brown's blog

the atom smasher

"Review: The Atom Smashers"

by

Duran

October 1st, 2008

Who knew smashing atoms together would be so interesting?

With all the hoopla lately over the possible end of the world and the recent launch of CERN's new Large Hadron Collider, this movie's release was timed pretty well.

The Atom Smashers follows a group of physicists who are all involved in research at Fermilab to look for the famed Higgs Boson, or "God Particle", well before the folks in Europe started looking. But instead of just chronicling the hunt itself, the documentary examines the daily lives of the men and women who have devoted their careers to look for something they don't really know exists. An apt quote from the movie goes, "It is difficult to see a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat."

Instead of wearing white lab coats and pocket protectors, these career-long geeks are shown not to be anything near society's stereotypical perception of scientists. They play in rock bands, dress like skaters, dance in salsa clubs (albeit badly), and fly model airplanes. They have relationships with each other that come under strain with project deadlines and conferences. The researchers are seen as human beings with super-human determination.

In addition to the personal struggle to maintain normal lives, the scientists come under intense pressure with reduced funding and program cuts from the Bush administration. It points out the irony about how the people making the decisions for scientific funding don't fully understand the underlying principles of the science that is being researched. They also feel the heat as they compete with the impending completion of the European machine, in a race that is seen as "competitive collaboration".

Being an engineer myself, I related to this piece quite well and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with an ounce of inner-geekdom. Any film where you can just sense the tension on screen is a good film in my books. The documentary also does a great job of examining the question of "why" and the whole purpose behind the decades-long search for the elusive particle.

It's unfortunate however that the ending is open ended. But then again, that's all due to timing, as the search for the "God Particle" continues...

Fermilab vs CERN--clash of atomic titans

PBS's Independent Lens on Tuesday November 25th will offer a film on Fermilab's competition with the LHC to discover the Higgs boson particle.

"Film chronicles race between Fermilab and CERN"

September 2nd, 2008

Symmetry

A character-driven documentary highlights the cross-Atlantic competition pitting US-based Fermilab against Europe-based CERN in the race to discover the supposed mass-endowing Higgs boson particle.

This research showdown will premier at the world’s largest science celebration, Science Chicago.

The 75-minute film Atom Smashers will air Sept. 19 and 21 at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry with a panel session following the initial screening. Eight Fermilab scientists play key roles while other employees appear occasionally in shots.

Following its Chicago debut, the film will head to several international cities and hit the air ways with a 53-minute version on PBS’s Independent Lens Nov. 25.

Co-director Monica Ross, an adjunct professor at Columbia College in Chicago, said the film doesn’t follow the traditional NOVA-like format of scientist interviews. Instead, the crew followed the lives of scientists working and trying to relax amidst the pressures of dealing with budget cuts, aging machinery, and the threat of watching the prize from a more than decade long search be ripped out of their grasp by the new experiment on the block: the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

"There is enough physics there for the people that are interested to find out what the Higgs boson is and how the Tevatron works," says co-director Clayton Brown, a lecturer at Northwestern University. "But for those people who say, 'I flunked high school physics' there is enough character building, politics and culture to engage them."

In between long hours analyzing data and fixing four-story detectors, you see physicists engaging in athletic and musical hobbies and struggling with questions about how to balance a career and family.

While the larger story of the film draws on the quest for scientific discovery and America’s turbulent relationship with science funding, the characters demonstrate the similarities among the passionate in all careers.

"I think most people don’t tend to associate the words passion and obsession with physicists or scientists in general," Brown says. "They think of them as very dry. It has been really great to show the rest of the world that physicists are just as passionate or obsessed about what they are working on as musicians or poets."

The Chicago-based 137films acquired 110 hours of interviews during 3½ years of filming at Fermilab, in Washington DC, London, and New York. Footage of CERN was borrowed from a director working on a documentary there. The film has received international attention from several film and science festivals.

Although none of the crew has a scientific background, they say they are fascinated by science's ability to explain "who we are, what we do, and why we are here."

The documentary poses questions for the public to consider.

"We hope viewers will come away from this asking themselves: Should we continue to do this type of work? And it looks like the dominance is shifting overseas, is that something we should be concerned about?," Brown says. "Those questions are too important for us to answer for the viewer."

Preview

The Atom Smashers

Fermilab 'ghosts' hint at new particles

Hercule Poirot, et. al. at Fermilab

Fermilab

Hercule Poirot

The following is most interesting and worthy of the talents of C. Auguste Dupin, Hercule Poirot, or Sherlock Holmes. Read the story as it unfolds.

"Mysterious coded note delivered to Fermilab
Online physics community tries to unlock key to secret message"

by

Jeremy Manier

July 11th, 2008

Chicago Tribune

The enigma began last year when a plain envelope with no return address arrived at the world-famous physics laboratory outside Chicago, addressed simply to "Fermilab."

Inside was a single sheet marked by pen with a bizarre series of hash marks, numbers and alien-looking symbols.

No one at the lab could make sense of the letter. Was it a joke? A threat? A hint at some exotic new theory?

Whatever the meaning, something about the inscription's order and symmetry touched Judy Jackson, the first person to examine the letter. "It was beautiful, kind of like abstract art," said Jackson, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's director of public affairs.

In hopes of cracking the code, Jackson's colleagues posted the letter in May on their Internet blog.

Hundreds of people from around the world responded and several of them quickly deciphered part of the hidden message, discovering to their surprise that it named an 86-year-old retired physicist from Princeton University who designed some of Fermilab's first experimental tools.

But one section of the cipher continues to resist any solution, and no one knows the sender's identity-though many suspect the author was a lab insider.

The keys to the mystery have taken code-breakers on a romp that encompasses Fermi's earliest days in the 1960s, the cryptic jargon of computer programming and high-energy physics, and the power of "crowdsourcing," or unleashing a problem on the collective intelligence of an Internet community.

"It's really a treasure-hunt mentality," said one of the code-breakers, Geoff Milburn, an engineer with the Canadian Space Agency based near Montreal.

Fermi has always been a beacon for amateur scientists and anyone eager to air an odd theory or puzzling proclamation, so the arrival of an unsolicited letter on March 5, 2007, was not unusual.

"We get a couple of these a week, everything from curious kids to someone writing about the latest developments in his proof that Einstein was wrong," Jackson said.

Blog attracts 30,000

On May 15, Jackson's group released the letter on a physics blog they had launched recently, under the heading, "Code crackers wanted!" Within a day the blog post attracted 30,000 visitors, many drawn by a link from the technology news site Slashdot, self-described as "news for nerds."

At first the technophiles seemed stumped. Proposals for a solution trickled in-some serious, some fanciful. A couple of Slashdot users suggested the marks were a kind of music notation; another theorized it was a test by the National Security Agency to see how people solve complex codes.

One wag opined in mock horror: "It's a cookbook!"

But several amateur decoders zeroed in on a solution on May 16, the day after the original post appeared. They noticed that the hash marks in the top part of the message came in distinct bunches of between one and three marks, appearing as I, II or III.

That suggested the code was mathematical, many analysts thought. Furthermore, the use of just three digits implied that the code relied on the base-3 counting system, as opposed to the base-10 system we use for everyday math problems.

To Milburn of Canada, a puzzle aficionado since childhood, the base-3 system made sense because it could yield 27 distinct combinations using three digits-just enough to encode all the letters of the alphabet, plus a spare combination used for spacing.

"It's best to assume the simplest solution, and if that doesn't work, then try something more complicated," Milburn said.

Milburn wrote down the sequence of base-3 numbers from 1 to 27, then assigned a letter to each number, with the last number representing a space. But that attempt yielded only gibberish when he plugged it into the Fermilab code. So he tried again with a slight shift, assigning the blank space to the first number instead of the last.

That coding technique yielded the following:

"FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE."

The bottom group of hash marks used a slightly different base-3 code, which the code-breakers cracked using a similar technique. It read:

"EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN."

As strange as the code itself had been, the decoded message seemed just as inscrutable. But seeing the name on the Fermilab message board prompted a shiver of recognition for Peter Meyers, a Princeton University physics professor who has occupied an office across the hall from fellow physicist Frank Shoemaker for more than 20 years.

"It's kind of like finding your friend's name in some ancient hieroglyphics," Meyers said.

The code's reference to Shoemaker, a Fermilab legend, suggested that the author was a physics insider. Shoemaker had arrived at Princeton in 1951 when Albert Einstein still showed up for the occasional physics lecture there.

In the late 1960s, Shoemaker led the team that designed the powerful magnets for Fermilab's first big particle accelerator, the Main Ring.

Meyers said Shoemaker was an exacting researcher and would criticize fellow scientists who had failed to account for excess "noise" in their experiments. Shoemaker, now 86 and ailing, was amused by the code, Meyers said.

Asked if he thought the code's author was someone who knew him, Shoemaker told Meyers, "It's quite possible. The comment is not out of character for me."

Multiple theories floated

No one quite understands the second message about an employee number, though many decoders think it refers to the author's old employee number at Fermilab. Most think "basse sixteen" was a typo and the author meant to write "base sixteen," referring to the mathematical technique needed to decode the employee number.

The key may reside in the code's alien-looking middle section, which remains as baffling as ever.

A few decoders think the solutions found thus far are just a ruse, hiding a deeper message.

Work on the enigma shares many qualities with genuine physics research, experts said-first comes a hunch, then refinement of ideas and finally the answer snaps into view. But for the Fermilab code, as for theories of the real world, a final solution may require another flash of insight.

"God particle"/Higgs boson--knowledge of the universe

And another model of the stuff that comprises the universe...in this case the elementary particle that gives mass to particles that have no mass and mass to all elementary particles. Actually it is just a part of the established "standard model of physics" but it is crucial to discover its existence or not. Its discovery would confirm the "standard model of physics" and concluding that it doesn't exist will alter physics...if there is no Higgs boson, science will be left totally unable to explain mass. "Without the Higgs, all fundamental particles would be massless, and the universe would be very different. The weak nuclear forces wouldn't be weak at all, for instance, so the elemental composition of the cosmos would be radically different, stars would shine differently, and we probably wouldn't exist." said Dave Rainwater of FermiLab. Popular physicist Leon Lederman has called it the "God particle" and actively being pursued at Fermilab's Tevatron and the nearly completed Large Hadron Collider [LHC] will collide protons at seven times the energy levels of the Tevatron and is expected to begin operations in June 2008--maybe. It has had some setbacks. "Supersymmetry is a relationship between the particles of matter and the forces of the universe. Mathematically, it's beautiful. Not one piece of direct experimental data really supports it yet. Finding a Higgs in the place we expect would be a piece of evidence. Not finding it would be a big problem for the advocates of this idea.", said John Womersley of FermiLab. All of this is an excellent example of a working model and challenges the limits of mankind's knowledge of the universe.


The God Particle

by

Leon Lederman

ISBN 0395558492