A film documentary about the discovery of the Higgs Boson illustrates the nature of scientific discovery, according to film critic Andrew O’Hehir:
“Particle Fever” illustrates the great strength and resilience of the scientific method, with its time-honored propensity for proving wrong the best guesses of brilliant minds. As the Stanford physicist Savas Dimopoulos tells Levinson’s camera, a career in science is often about being wrong over and over and over again, and continuing to learn from those errors. This has a profound personal resonance for Dimopoulos, who openly discusses the fact that the Higgs experiments performed so far within the Large Hadron Collider or LHC, a 17-mile tunnel beneath the Franco-Swiss border, suggest that he has spent 30 years pursuing a theoretical model that is quite likely incorrect or insufficient. In the American context of bizarre public attacks on science by creationists and climate-change deniers who can never be proven wrong by any evidence they are likely to accept, the grace and dignity of this eminent scientist provide an especially worthwhile lesson.
