Tonight’s Horizon tackles some very challenging physics. Nature Network London joins the production team to see how they explain the arcane.
Tristan Farrow
Science documentaries are not always well-received by the scientific community. The Great Global Warming Swindle, a recent film from Channel 4, is an extreme example, currently causing a furore among scientists who cite numerous misrepresentations of fact.
Not every documentary is this controversial. But all have to meet the challenge of presenting complicated data to a lay-audience while telling a compelling story. To learn more, I spent a week with the makers of the BBC’s flagship science series Horizon.
Inside the production studio
The mixing studio is housed in a drab 1960’s high-rise block in the middle of Soho. I find Horizon director James van der Pool cooped up in the cutting room, editing the latest instalment of the series. The myriad dials and switches evoke a laboratory that most physics postdocs would find homely.
Here’s a challenge: the biggest experiment in the world is about to swing into action to discover a particle that will either make or break our understanding of the universe, and you are asked to film it. There is a problem – apart from the monumental machines that run the experiment, there is nothing tangible at which you can point your camera. So how do you keep a primetime television audience of millions glued to the screen with such unpromising material?
That was the task facing van der Pool four months ago, when Horizon’s series editor Andrew Cohen, an alumnus of Imperial College, suggested a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva that promises to discover the Higgs particle, believed to give objects their mass.
Making physics sexy
Unlike ‘blockbuster science’ – dinosaurs, space, cloning – less penetrable fields like particle physics can leave audiences cold. “The Higgs particle is an abstract concept which is very difficult to explain,” says van der Pool, who has been directing Horizon documentaries for two years. “You can’t tackle the LHC and the Higgs particle directly. You need a bigger hook to grab attention and a compelling story that people can follow.”
The hook, in this case, is the unsettling idea that the LHC could accidentally produce a black hole and destroy the world. Although conceivable, the odds are vanishingly small, and scientists dispel the idea later in the programme.
From the Big Bang to the LHC
Once viewers have been drawn into the film, they are carried on an upbeat tour of physics by a cast of colourful scientists and their epic quest to understand how the universe began. The tension is ratcheted up half way through, when the scientists’ efforts hit the brick wall of the Cosmic Microwave Background. As van der Pool explains, “To overcome it, the logical next step is to recreate the Big Bang here on earth”. The stage is now set for explaining why the LHC is needed and how it aims to simulate the Big Bang. “The result is a compelling story on which you can hang the LHC experiment. Opening the film with the LHC and the Higgs particle wouldn’t work.”
Mission accomplished?
Many professional scientists remember their interest in science being sparked by programmes like Horizon. Although the format has adapted to a generation that is supposedly less patient, it would be surprising if youngsters watching the series nowadays were left without a sense of wonder. This is science told through the extraordinary tales of human ingenuity, persistence and the thrill of discovery.
‘The Six Billion Dollar Experiment’, Horizon’s documentary about the LHC, will be broadcast on Tuesday 1 May 2007, 9pm on BBC Two
I do remember my interest in science being sparked by Horizon back in my chemistry set and magnifying glass days. Recently, though, I’ve found the show a little… how best to put it… not good?
Recently, I watched a sneaky pirated copy of a wonderful interview with Richard Feynmann (released under the Horizon strand in the 80s) whose title, “the pleasure of finding things out”, is a sentiment which seems to have been lacking from most Popular Science shows for the last decade. Instead, there seems to be a fixation with risible doomy guff like the recent-ish documentary “Human 2.0”, which left us all wondering if the dudes at Horizon were perhaps a few Kevin Warwicks short of a technological singularity.
Sadly, my generation’s short attention span prevents me from speculating on why exactly there’s been this shift from the joy of finding things out to “are cyborg rat higgs bosons after our babies?”, so I’ll have to leave it as an exercise for the reader.
After reading your blog I downloaded the Horizon video podcast to watch on the train, and I must say I had difficulty concentrating on the thing even in its much abridged form. I’m not quite sure if it was that the subject was too complex, or just that the jump cuts of sparky fireworks and closeups of bits of metal were too annoying.
Now the bit about Higgs particles really attracted my interest, and there was great potential there for some cool animation, but instead it was just more vague light shows… I’m not asking for LOTR-quality CGI or anything, just a simple cartoon would do!
One other thing that vexed slightly, the almost diary-room style interviews with scientists. To me the best science programs are like magic shows, not reality tv…
(on the plus side at least it’s real science on telly and not tomatoes = cancer or similar…)
I read the two posts above with interest. Feynman’s interview is very engaging but the subject in that documentary is quite different – and an engaging speaker himself. Human v2.0 was gloomy, but i didn’t find that to be true of the LHC. In the making of this documentary about a subject as abstract as the Higgs field, the director gave a lot of space to symbolism – notice the recurring scenes of sky and sun, contrasted with aerial views of New York and New Jersey at dusk. A lot of thought and art went into composing the film that i suspect is being overlooked.