Physics Buzz

I just got my tickets for tonight's showing of Particle Fever , the new documentary about physicists at CERN looking for the Higgs boson. I'm pretty stoked, I'll post a review of it tomorrow   Friday . Particle Fever (2013) It got me thinking about how over the last couple of years, there's been a whole mess of full length features and short films released featuring real particle physicists talking about and doing real science. It's been an exciting time in the field, and moviemakers have really picked up on it. Not only that, but it's easier than ever for scientists to make their own shorts about their science. So I came up with a list of the top five movies about the Higgs boson. In no particular order...

Peter Higgs may have to be satisfied with this plushie prize, at least for now. At 9:45 Greenwich Mean Time tomorrow morning (that's 5:45 a.m. if you're on the East Coast in America), the Nobel Prize committee will announce the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. If you're in Europe, or a particularly early riser, you can watch the live webcast of the announcement . Everyone's been tossing out Nobel Prize predictions this year , and a recent announcement of another award is adding to the growing pile of evidence that Peter Higgs won't get his Swedish laurels tomorrow. The American Physical Society has awarded Higgs and five other physicists the 2010 J.J. Sakurai prize, one of the most distinguished awards a theoretical physicist can hope to get, "for elucidation of the properties of spontaneous symmetry breaking in four-dimensional relativistic gauge theory and of the mechanism for the consistent generation of vector boson masses"—that is, devel

Colliding Particles - Episode 1: Codename Eurostar from Mike Paterson on Vimeo . Forget the cheesy narrator and hokey graphics. Wobble the camera like you're Michel Gondry filming Eternal Sunshine . Ditch the pseudo-techno soundtrack that makes the kids shake their heads at you for trying to be hip, and go for something understated. Then you might have something as good as Colliding Particles . The filmmakers behind this unusual web series have thrown pretty much every science documentary convention to the wind, and, in doing so, have hit on something great.(Face it, unless it's David Attenborough we can do without a disembodied voice booming over stock footage of stars and sunsets.) As the name suggests, Colliding Particles does indeed tackle that behemoth of physics, the Large Hadron Collider . But by focusing on just three people among the thousands that contribute to the grand project, the series avoids watching like just another mildly interesting film about the LH