Film review

I didn't dislike "Particle Fever;" it was entertaining... and, also, disappointing.

It was really cool to see the equipment up close and at scale, and what was meaningful was the story arc of decades of work and doubt and errors along the way eventually paying off. But I wanted more; I wanted to better understand the science behind the discoveries. Instead, I got a very well-done human-interest story, with lots of close-ups of philosophizing scientists.

This has been my complaint with many a documentary: too much of people talking--too little showing, too much telling. Biographical documentaries are the worst--lots of contemporaries sitting around, talking about how wonderful the subject is. Who watches a film of any sort--even a documentary--to hear people sit around talking? "Particle Fever" was at least not that; there was plenty of action. But, not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted and expected more.

Mind you, who the f* am I? Apparently, not the intended audience. You'll love this film if you're a physicist and you already understand the science, don't need the documentary to help you understand it. Or maybe if you're a teenager wondering what to study. Or if you know nothing at all about the topic, and wonder what all the fuss was about and why people were concerned that about a black hole outside Geneva. But if you're like me--if you have a basic understanding of particle physics but want to know more without going to night school to brush up on your differential calculus--you're $hit out of luck. "Particle Fever" will show you the molten magnets without telling you what the magnets are for in the first place. A voice will tell you that the Higgs particle grants mass to some particles, but won't tell you why some and not others. The known particles will quickly flash on the screen, but no one will explain them. Don't say, "but you wouldn't get it," because (even) I do. There are lots of things that were unsaid but implied in the film that I already knew, but I wished would be explained in greater depth.

Also off-putting was the idea that there's nothing out there worth studying. Interviewee after interviewee talked about how they came to their career choices because no other field answered any question that mattered. To which I recycle an old excerpt about how there's more to the world than math:

Physics’ capacity for universal mathematical laws, doesn’t yet fit all of life.

The mathocentric faith of Galileo’s disciples can be unwise. Wisdom means knowing how to choose rightly, for example picking the thinking tool fittest for each task. Economists who rely mainly on numbers to define rational behavior unwisely ignore that we aren’t by nature calculators. Math takes training. Maximizing narrow monetary self-interest isn’t a fit proxy for evolutionary success (for a highly interdependent species).

Numbers and mathematics have no monopoly on precision or truth. Words, logic, images, and patterns can be qualitatively exact. Only poor-quality thinking ignores that mathematics can’t yet be counted on to add up to the sum of all human wisdom. Reason and prudence dictate that we keep different kinds of thinking tools in our cranial toolboxes.

To recycle another old post, in which I complained about physical-scientist exceptionalism, the link in this one actually had a better approach: when people ask questions, answer them. Don't cop an attitude based on the idea that they wouldn't understand the answer; answer the question in a way that's meaningful to a non-expert. People in all fields do it all the time. It may be poetry in translation, but it's still poetry. And "Particle Fever" has its moments, but it also misses a lot of opportunities.