Movie Star Physicists

A TV documentary film directed by Clayton Brown and Monica Ross will be aired today on PBS, presenting the lives of the scientists from the American Fermilab laboratory in Illinois. "The Atom Smashers," as the saga movie is called, tries to reveal the real, human aspects behind the "talking heads" that are usually showed on TV with the occasion of some hypothetical breakthrough discoveries or glitches related to the devices they use.

The film has already been presented at movie festivals for several weeks now and is focused on Fermilab's years long quest for the Higgs boson, better known by its generic name of “the God particle,” but also has an impending LHC feeling looming all along. It even stresses on themes related to the competition between the US-based Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab and the European Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.

 

Some of the scientists whose lives are smashed on the screen will include Ben Kilminster (a rock singer and newcoming physicist), Marcela Carena (a theoretical physicist born in Argentine), Leon Lederman (a Nobel prize winner and prominent figure in the search for the Higgs boson, whose current career is presented in parallel with his appearance on the talk show "Donahue" nearly 30 years ago), as well as the married-with-children couple John Conway and Robin Erbacher, both University of California physicists in Davis.

 

"The scientists express their fears and their hopes, which is something you rarely see scientists do," Brown explained for the Associated Press, as quoted by MSNBC. "We rarely see them frustrated or disappointed, or wonder whether this is the time to have a kid." The movie already changed the lives of its characters, as Conway shares. "It's certainly the first time I've been asked for my autograph," he says. "It's the first time a film has made physics look as cool as we think it is." His wife added that "It certainly makes continuing to work on the Tevatron exciting while we wait for the LHC".