Particle Fever

If the Higgs Boson had turned out to be 115 gigaelectonvolts it would have supported the theoretical notion of supersymmetry, filling in the missing piece of the puzzle about the Standard Model of matter. If it had weighed in at 140 it would argued the idea of the multiverse, a concept which led to the frightening idea of chaos, in which the particle itself would prove to be less a key to the understanding of what happened at the time of the big bang than a kind epistemological black hole. As it was in 2012 when the two beams of protons traveling near the speed of light through the l7 mile long LHC actually began to collide, the Boson turned out to be uncooperative coming in about 126 GeV, a number that left more questions than answers and supported neither theory. At one point during Particle Fever Mark Levinson’s almost Socratic dialogue between the experimental and theoretical physicists involved with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, an economist asks how the enormously expensive and time consuming activity can be justified. “What is it good for? “ he demands to know, about a project which for some scientists is comparable in ambition to the building of the Pyramids. “Nothing except understanding everything,” is the response of the David Kaplan, a physicist who is also the film’s narrator. On a more basic level have you ever wondered, what really goes on inside the LHC where the conditions that occurred at the moment of the big bang are duplicated? Have you ever tried to imagine how energy of this scale could be generated (giant super cooled magnets are used) or what it would look like? Then Particle Fever takes you inside the inner workers of a project involving thousands of scientists sometimes from warring counties like Pakistan and India, Georgia and Russia who all work together to try to unearth the secrets of things like the cosmological constant, dark matter and the reason why the universe continues to expand. The reclusive Peter Higgs, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 2013 and who doesn’t even own a cellphone or employ the internet (“Nobel Prize winner Peter Higgs doesn’t own a cellphone or use the internet,” The Week, 10/8/13), even makes a cameo appearance in a film that unlocks secrets of nature, science and even art.

Trading Places

“The Tradeworx computers get price quotes from the exchanges, decide how to trade, complete a risk analysis and generate a buy or sell order—in 20 microseconds,” reported the Times in a piece about the new phenomenon of high speed trading (“Speedy New Traders Make Waves Far From Wall St,” NYT, May 16, 2010). Whether you follow Warren Buffett’s notion of the equity based trade or the Soros model based on reflexivity, everything is a little faster these days. It’s like running on a waxed kitchen floor. At some point you’re going to slip and fall. That’s what happened to the market on May 6, when it fell l000 points in a matter of minutes. Of course, everything’s relative in a multiverse where CERN’s Large Hadron Collider recreates Higgs Bosons and other particles that sprang to life a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. The whole structure of the financial world has changed. Blue-blood families, who might have held stocks in companies like Union Carbide, Exxon or IBM for generations, now pride themselves on holding portfolios for over five seconds. Whether you study a company’s spread sheet and involve yourself in a firm’s business, like Buffett did when he purchased his preferred position in Goldman Sachs, or you deal with currency fluctuations and market forces as Soros has done, in the brave new world of finance your relationship with management will be considered long term if you hold a stock for over thirty seconds. But as seasoned high-speed traders learn in their relatively short half-lives, much can happen in a short period of time, a premise that comes to high finance from pornography, where the short loop in which the beginning, middle and end of a sex act are condensed into a single action long ago replaced the more leisurely story lines of Debbie Does Dallas, Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat. Yes, the old Newtonian trading, where investors purchased stock and actually received certificates that they put in their vaults, is a vestige of an age when people read books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Ulysses.