Showing posts with label Nova. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nova. Show all posts

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Particles: Nova's story of the Higgs Boson and Large Hadron Collider

Nova on NPR ran this show.  The subject matter is fascinating, the mysterious "God Particle", the biggest particle accelerator ever built.  Claims to discover the basis of "the standard model" or the fundamentals of space time. 
   The TV show had a lot of shots of physicists and bigwigs partying and drinking champagne to celebrate major milestones.  Some cool shots of big pipes running down endless tunnels.  Shots of physicists bicycling to and from work. 
   It did not explain what the Higgs boson is, or why we expected it to exist.  No mention of the boson's mass, electric charge, spin, lifetime, or how we would detect one, should one form.  No discussion of the accelerator, what keeps the particle beam on course running down the pipes.  No discussion of what fields are used to accelerate the particles down the 50 mile radius particle racetrace.  No mention of how close to the speed of light the particle speed reached.  No mention of  how the accelerator compensated for the growth of particle mass as the speed of light is approached. No mention of what particles were accelerated, I assume protons, but it would be nice to know.  CERN had a serious accident in the early days, the particle beam came off the track and burned a hole thru the wall of the vacuum chamber.  They didn't bother to show the damaged piece of pipe up close. The camera swept over a stack of pipes, one of them was burned black on the outside, but that was it.
    They interviewed a number of the physicists, but they all talked about metaphysics, what it means, what it might mean, the goodness of doing it.  That ain't science.  Science is observations and measurements tied together with theory.  Nobody talked science.
   Really too bad.  I guess the TV show producers know little science themselves , and don't care much about it.