Who said that good documentary making is all about timing?

More info on the screening dates of Higgs during the festival you find on IDFA’s website. See below for the trailer.

Picture: one of the characters in the documentary prof. dr. Stan Bentvelsen

Yes, our film is ready. And we’re really proud of it. Recently we organised a closed preview for our crew and some close friends and colleagues and they all responded truly complimentary and enthusiastic.

And what’s more: last week we were informed that the film is selected for the International Documentary Filmfestival of Amsterdam, IDFA (19 - 29 November).
We’ll keep you informed about the screening dates as soon as possible.

Sure, basically film is all about moving images telling a story.
However, as is the case in theatre, there’s hardly anything as moving in film as an imaginative and elucidating text; spoken by an intriguing character. Someone like Michael Doser for example, a physicist at Cern who we got to know thanks to our British colleague Ken McMullen.

Now, killing one of Doser’s statements was inevitable because he just gave us too many; statements about particle physics in general and the Higgs mechanism in particular. In contrast to our previous killed-darling (see my previous blog) Doser hasn’t been completely abandoned to the Xtra’s on our DVD version of the film (to come). Nevertheless it hurts a lot that the following statement isn’t going to make it into the final version. The good news however, is that it tells you already something about the high quality of the statements that díd survive the editing. Including some other poetry-like lines by Michael Doser.

Here’s my second Kill-your-darlings fragment:
“Although the Higgs particle or the Higgs mechanism tells you what mass is – you get mass by interacting with the Higgs particle – what it doesn’t tell you is: ‘why there is this mass’, and ‘why this specific mass’. maybe it will tell you how particles get mass, but not what mass is good for, nor why they have that specific mass. We’ve got dozens of particles and every particle has óne specific mass. Some of them very small, some of them very large, intermediate ones. But they’re only very discrete values, very specific values. Why those, rather than any other value? And is there any logic to the pattern of the masses? It’s not like óne particle has óne mass and the other is twice as heavy and the next one three times as heavy. They’re random progression, between the lightest and the heaviest particles.

So, where does that come from? Why is that the case? And this is something that the next generation of physicists, or maybe a few more than that, will have to think about. How do you generate these specific masses and what do they mean? And that’s just one area. And there are many other area’s of the same type. Questions that, even if you get the LHC to run and you find the Higgs particle and find other stuff as well – supersymmetric particles, maybe extra dimensions, lots of possibilities – whatever you find is gonna open up new questions behind it and you want to try and answer those questions as well.”

“If it was not for this phenomenon (the Higgs mechanism) we would not have had spaghetti with mass! What would you eat?” (Antonino Zichichi)

For some background information about the context of this quote, see: the inner Zichichi factor

However, things are going well here, inside the editing room, although the beautiful weather outside is really tempting from time to time.

Today we’ve been working on a part of the film, in which CERN physicists explain that the quest for the Higgs boson is of course one of the main goals for the LHC but anything bút the end of the story. “Like with every good story”, says Press Officer James Gillies, “whenever you close one chapter you automatically open another new chapter. And that’s exactly what’s the case with the Higgs-story.” In the words of experimental physicist Michael Doser: “Whatever you find, you’re going to find new questions and you want to answer these questions as well.”

So here’s another good reason for us to start working on a sequel. To be entitled: Beyond Higgs!

Now, yesterday our editor Ben de Loenen flew in from his hometown Barcelona and our composer Jacq Palinckx arrived from Tilburg to collaborate with my co-director Hannie and me to start editing the final version of our film.

I’ll try to keep you informed, on a daily basis, about our editing-adventures. Which means as much as: to be continued (tomorrow).

… Jan van den Berg (co-direction) is explaining the next scene to prof. dr. Stan Bentvelsen and drs. Alexander Doxiadis (protagonists in our documentary).

For Bentvelsen’s blog on the Volkskrant site (in Dutch), see: Bentvelsen is blogging.

For a short introduction to Stan Bentvelsen, please see Stan Bentvelsen

At the Adhoc offices, we devoted a hilarious brainstorming session to what kind of final on-site project we could present to the Cern directors if the 27 km tunnel, including the four immense detector halls, is put out of operation before it has ever been put into operation.

Today we visited Stan Bentvelsen in his workroom at the Nikhef in Amsterdam and happened to ask him how we could reassure our worried friends and web log followers about their fears of a possible black catastrophe. Here’s a short version of his answer, which probably can only really reassure sympathetically disposed listeners.

“Because of the recent media attention and the lawsuit, a couple of scientists at Cern did some recalculating in order to see how great the chance is – or how very tiny or zero – of creating one or more black holes. And to estimate what the consequences of such a Tiny Black Hole might be. The black hole workgroup, led by the Italian Michelangelo L. Mangano, has calculated that this chance is indeed negligibly small, but nót zero. But also that it would take billions of years before such a black hole could become large enough to devour our blue planet within its inky depths.”

So now you know. Sleep well, and sweet dreams.