Sigh. It’s official.

The Tevatron, Fermilab’s 4-mile particle accelerator that we came to know and love during the filming of The Atom Smashers, the cantankerous engine-that-could that made European physicists sweat and curse its surprising eagerness to find the Higgs particle, the ugly but appealing underdog that generated rumor after rumor after rumor after report after speculation that it might have already found the Higgs or is likely to find it, David-style, before its shiny new, expensive and fragile Goliath, has now officially reached the end of its rope.

Yes, the announcement came last week that the Tevatron would be shutting down for the last time on October 1, 2011.  The US Department of Energy says funding will not be granted to keep it running until 2014 as previously speculated.  Our friend John Conway wrote a nice long post on Cosmic Variance describing the history of particle accelerators in the US, and it’s interesting to read all the comments at the end from science-minded folks.

Complicating the matter emotionally is that there is a fair amount of support from US scientists to let the Tevatron die.  The director of the lab, Pier Odonne, realizes that if congress were to find more money to keep it running, other aspects of research would have to be squeezed, putting neutrino research (among other areas) in jeopardy.  “I do not support squeezing the funds for an extension of the run out of the rest of the high-energy physics community,” he wrote.

We talked to some scientists who were less than weepy-eyed as well.  Most of them believe the Tevatron has run its course and to keep it alive will simply delay any prospects for building another more modern accelerator, probably a linear accelerator, at Fermilab, and to hopefully capture the big prize: the International Linear Collider. But another scientist we spoke to called it a “sad day:” “with no accelerators in the U.S., and no plans to build any, we have now become a neutrino and astrophysics country, in spite of our prestigious history in particle physics.”

I must say, given this turn of events, I’m proud of the work that we did in capturing some of the last years of the Tevatron in The Atom Smashers. And I’ll regret knowing that CDF and D0 (the two collision sites on the Tevatron) aren’t engaged in their cooperative / competitive dance any more, playing softball, cheering each other on while secretly grinning when the other makes a gaffe, and that Bob Mau and the crew aren’t donning protective suits and geiger counters as they tune up the old beast for another startup.

Progress must be made.  But sometimes it’s hard to tell what constitutes progress these days.

Give ‘em hell for the next 10 months, Tevatron!

Who says science is boring?

Just heard a fascinating story on Bob Edwards Weekend about George Price, a mathematician / scientist / evolutionarly theorist who became obsessed with understanding altruism in genetic and mathematical terms.  He devised a formula that could explain it, then gave away his invention of computer-aided design, which would have made him a multi-millionaire if he had put a patent on it.  Not satisfied with how his mathematical formula explained why people are nice to each other, he proceeded to give all his money away to homeless people he found in London.  Once he realized that there was no way to quantify his own altruism (am I being nice?  Or am I being nice because I want to observe the process of being nice with myself as the subject of observation?), he proceeded to commit suicide with a pair of scissors.  His suicide note was addressed to a woman who had been homeless and who had no idea that he was a well-known theoretician.  She just knew him as a nice man.

Who says science is boring??

We live in a strange country

I was reading Scientific American last night and came across Lawrence Krauss’s regular column, “Critical Mass.” He quoted some alarming statistics from the Science and Engineering Indicators report (published every two years).  Adults in our country are less willing to believe that Evolution and the Big Bang are facts than adults in other industrial countries.  But he dug deeper to find some figures that were omitted from that report.  Here are two questions and their answers:

1. “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.”  only 45% answered “true” in the U.S. (Japan: 78%, Europe: 70%, China: 69%, South Korea: 64%)

2. “The Universe began with a big explosion.” only 33% answered “true” in the U.S.

I did a little more research:

• Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
• Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
• Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water.
• 55% of Americans believe in angels, including 50% who believe they are protected by a guardian angel.
• Only 49% of Americans believe human activity is causing global warming.
• Only 10% of Americans know what radiation is.

American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

I find this very depressing.  But also very strange, given that 4 in 5 American adults believe science education is “absolutely essential” or “very important” for US healthcare, global reputation, and economy.  How can these both be true?  My hero, Carl Sagan, explained it eloquently here. He got off a plane once and took a cab with someone who was very excited to find out he was riding with “that science guy.”  He was really excited because he had lots of questions about science.  However, to Sagan’s dismay, the guy wanted to know about UFOs, channeling, crystals, and astrology.  In a (compound) word, pseudo-science.  Sagan’s take was perfect:

“[my companion] was well-spoken, intelligent, curious—had heard virtually nothing of modern science. He wanted to know about science. It’s just that all the science got filtered out before it reached him. What society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion. And it had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation.”

As 137 Films works on a film called The Believers about the two electro-chemists from Utah who claimed they had discovered Cold Fusion, it’s fascinating for me to juggle how I feel about that so-called discovery.  I have heard extremely rational, clear-eyed, respectable people tell me both that “cold fusion is complete nonsense” and that “we can prove beyond a doubt that it’s real.”  Monica and I got asked many times in New York when we were at the IFP Independent Film Week “so, what do you believe?  Is cold fusion real or not?”  We had to explain that that was not our, or the film’s, intention.  We are not going to answer that question.  We are going to raise that question.  And if scientists disapprove of our film and believe we are contributing to the confusion of Carl Sagan’s passenger, I would refer them to the last sentence in Dr. Sagan’s quote above and say that, in fact, I believe, is our mission.

The way Monica describes our company’s objective is that we raise scientific literacy through storytelling.  With The Atom Smashers, audience members left the theatre or turned off the TV knowing, roughly, how a particle accelerator works by following a race to make a discovery.  With The Believers, maybe someone will come away knowing that fusion is supposed to create radiation because two people claimed they had discovered a way to do it safely, on a tabletop, at room temperature.

Maybe we can bring that 10% up to 11!

Back to the grind

I believe I mentioned The Believers has been accepted to Indpendent Film Week in NYC at the end of September.  They have a long list of deadlines we have to accomplish in advance of the event, and we just passed a major one: our trailer.  This is the short video that will be sent out to industry professionals to (hopefully) entice them to arrange a meeting with Monica and me about our film.  In the next day or two I’ll try to post the trailer so you can watch it.

But now that it’s done, you might think we can sit back and relax.  Not true — a non-profit organization’s work is never done.  Our next deadline is August 7, and it’s time for yet another application to the granddaddy of all documentary grant applications: the ITVS grant.  A very large sum of money (usually in the 6-figures), and virtually guaranteed broadcast on Independent Lens or POV.  This will be our … ahem… sixth time to apply.  However, not to jinx anything, but after our last application we made it through to the second round, which had never happened before.  So keep your fingers crossed..

Freak Destruction in Chicago

Last night we had a massive thunderstorm here in Chicago.   All night the rain pounded on my window unit air conditioner like a crazed tap dancer, there were some decent winds, and an incredible amount of lightning and thunder.  This morning the rain had finally tapered off.  When I got to the El stop I was confronted by “caution” tape blocking off the entrance to the Logan Square Blue Line station.  I looked down the stairs and it appeared the whole entrance had been flooded.  A woman and I stood for a moment, looking at each other, and headed over to a different entrance, not sure if the whole station was closed.  It wasn’t, and we were able to get down, but gallons of water were streaming down from the ceiling and splashing all over the tracks.

I say all this to set the scene for what I saw when I was walking towards Michigan Avenue after I got out of the subway, and to explain why I was fooled.  I was on Lake street, having gotten off at the Clark & Lake stop.  I happened to turn to the left and saw this:

A massive concrete cupola had fallen from one of the historic buildings right on the Chicago river in the heart of downtown.  A couple of cars had been smashed and had burned, the pavement had understandably buckled, and the area was taped off with yellow caution tape like I had just encountered at the subway station.  There were no emergency vehicles present, which was a little strange, but I assumed that since the damage had already been done, and since you can’t really just pick up and move a several-ton concrete cupola from the street, that the emergency vehicles had left the scene.  A clean-up crew would probably arrive later to bust the thing up and haul it away, fixing the pavement later in the week.  I supposed that massive winds or a strike of lightening had knocked the thing off, or that somehow the huge amount of rain had finally loosened some corroded concrete or rusted out a support, causing the whole structure to fall about thirty stories to the street below.

Of course, the real answer is that I’m simply an idiot.  I met up with my friend and started describing what I had seen.  ”Did you see this?  A massive concrete cupola fell from the top of one of the buildings on Lake Street and smashed up some cars and…” and the scene sounded so ridiculous that I decided it couldn’t possibly be real.  That’s when I remembered that Transformers 3 is being filmed in Chicago.

Here’s a link to a video someone shot from one of the nearby hotels:

Yesterday, as part of the Fermilab project, Monica and I shot our only “talking head” interviews, and Stef, our cinematographer, decided we should use not one, but two cameras simultaneously.  So I shot a wider shot of our interviewee and she tightened up her camera into a closeup.  In editing, I can cut between the two.  It looks nice, and allows me to add emphasis and variety.

In the clip of Transformers 3, you can see that there’s a helicopter, a chase car with a camera, a large jib (the crane-looking thing lower left), and in other angles on youtube you can see there are a couple of hand-held cameras, and I’m sure there’s at least two or three on tripods.  In fact, I’m guessing that there are no less than ten cameras rolling on that scene.  It was a bit of a setup for Stef and me to get our two-camera interview shoot ready; I can’t even imagine what goes into a ten-camera shoot with explosions and helicopters on a busy intersection in downtown Chicago.

But one more thing about the broken pavement and fallen cupola.  After I left my friend and was walking around the mayhem still left after the shoot was over, I found a parking lot between two buildings where they had stored some extra “rubble” that they apparently didn’t need any longer. After the massive rain (that I thought was responsible for the whole thing), that piece of concrete in the lower right of the picture was … floating.  That’s right, as anyone who has ever worked near a film shoot or theatre production knows, there is no better substance for simulating concrete than styrofoam.  You can do amazing things with texture, paint, and it looks incredibly realistic.  So a shout out to all the set dressers and production designers who created such a realistic bit of destruction that it fooled me into thinking a real disaster had occurred.  In fact, I bet I could probably lift the fallen cupola, or at least shove it along the street for a few yards by myself.  As much as I hate Michael Bay movies, I gotta hand it to his production designers.  Nice work.

The Reverend Enoch Clayton Brown

My name is actually my middle name.  Clayton is also my dad’s middle name, my cousin’s middle name, my nephew’s middle name, my grandfather’s middle name, and my great-grandfather’s middle name.  From what I understand, my great-grandfather (Moses Clayton) was referred to as “Clayt.”  Enoch Clayton, my grandfather, died when I was in high school. He had been a baptist preacher, and when he died, my grandmother asked if there was anything of his that I would like.

As anyone who’s ever been in my house knows, I like old things.  When she asked this question, my eye fell on his old file cabinet.  It was probably made in the 50s, and is as solid as a steel safe.  I use it nearly every day. I recently moved, so I had to remove everything from the drawers in order to give the movers even a hope of lifting it.  Now that it’s in my new place, I started filling it back up again with my papers.

My grandfather had filled the bottom drawer with dividers to keep his documents organized.  But they were not the removable kind — it would require a bit of effort to get them out.  I considered tearing them out, but then I started reading the headers he had typed on them with his electric typewriter (the one I had played with as a kid in his office) and I immediately realized I wanted them to stay.  I wrote with pencil the headers I needed next to his: taxes, student loan, insurance, warrantees, important documents, documentary projects, fiction projects, miscellaneous.  But as I filed my papers this second time, I noticed again the headers he had typed and had to stop and wonder about the different lives we had lived, and the different things we thought about.  There are too many to include them all, but a partial list of his headings includes:
Atonement
Bible Characters
Bible Studies
Christ — Jesus
Christian Education
Christian Life
The Church — Its Commission and Ministry
Church Workers
Denomination — Baptist
Doctrinal Sermons
Eternity — Heaven (with “or hell” written in pencil)
Evangelism
Faith
Funeral Messages
God — The Father, Son, Holy Spirit, The Trinity
Home — Love, Courtship, Marriage, The Christian Home
Baptism and The Lord’s Supper
Prayer
Resurrection
Salvation — Repentance, Faith, Belief
Second Coming of Christ
Security of the Believer
Sin and Evil
Virgin Birth

I only heard my grandfather preach a couple of times, and I was very young, but from what I understand he was not at all a “fire-and-brimstone” type preacher, but rather more of a bible scholar whose sermons were more analysis and examination.  I’m assuming that these files used to contain his typed up sermons — I’m not sure what happened to them.  By the time I was old enough to have a meaningful conversation with him he had settled into a quiet man who sat stoically in an easy chair, not saying much.  Maybe by that time he had used up all his words.  Maybe he’d said all he needed to say.  One glimpse I had into his mode of expression was when I was quite young, playing around in front of the television as he sat in his easy chair.  I guess I stood up and got transfixed by something else, not moving, and was blocking his view.  He said, very calmly, “you’re not a window, son.”  It made perfect sense, even to a six-year old.  I also remember he made the best scrambled eggs I’ve ever had.

I plan to leave those file folders there forever, and will never take out the crooked “Rev. E. C. Brown” name tag on the front of the cabinet.  Maybe a future owner will wonder at the strange, often loaded (and completely unintentional) word pairings — his first in manual typewriter, all caps, mine second in handwritten pencil — on the file folders:
Bible Studies / Insurance
Christian Life / Warrantees
Doctrinal Studies / Fiction Projects
Faith / School
Christ Jesus / Student Loan
and (perhaps my favorite) Eternity – Heaven or Hell / Other Projects.

It’s very interesting to me to think about the conversations we might have had, and what he would have thought about The Atom Smashers, the Higgs boson, and neutrinos.  And it’s very hard to say which would be more intimidating (or inspiring) for a casual passerby to come across: a file folder marked “Neutrino Oscillation” or one marked “Eternity – Heaven (or Hell)”?

We’re going to NYC!

Our new film, The Believers, just got accepted to the Independent Media Week in New York in September!  This is great news for us, because this event is not a film festival, but rather a market.  This means that the public generally doesn’t come, but industry professionals do.  HBO, PBS, Focus Features, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, etc. etc. etc. all come to potentially buy films to distribute in theatres, on TV, cable, overseas, and on and on.  It’s a very important place for a filmmaker with a film in his/her back pocket to be.

Readers of my older blog will recall that we were invited to attend this event in the fall of 2007 with The Atom Smashers and it resulted in a deal that got our film on Independent Lens, as well as Netflix, itunes, Hulu, and several other places.  I wrote about it here and even made a blog entry for every day that we attended.  It was incredibly fun, a ton of work, completely exhausting, but very rewarding.

There are a lot of things we have to do to get ready… not the least of which is to prepare a great “elevator pitch.”  What’s that?  This American Life just did a show about the dreaded elevator pitch, which is when you find unexpectedly find yourself face-to-face with someone hugely important in your field in the elevator.  For example, let’s say I’m going up to the 30th floor at the IFP Market in New York, and in the lobby Harvey Weinstein walks into the elevator.  I’ve got a big, clunky badge on that says “Filmmaker.”  Weinstein notices, glances sideways at me and says “Filmmaker, eh?  What’s your film about?”

Elevator doors close.  Start the clock.  You’ve got 30 seconds to make your film sound like the most incredible thing Harvey Weinstein has ever heard about.  It will make him a lot of money and change the world, one stunned viewer at a time.  At the end of the 30 seconds, the doors open and Weinstein pauses.  He reaches for his coat pocket and hands you a business card.  ”Call my assistant,” he says, then walks out.  Open mouthed, everyone else in the elevator looks at you, amazed at what they have just witnessed.

That’s an elevator pitch.

Production on Fermilab film has begun

Photo: Andrew Suprenant

So, Monica (my co-director), Stefani (our cinematographer) and I have started shooting the new Fermilab promotional film.  Over a year ago, Fermilab contacted 137 Films because they were pleased enough with our depiction of their lab and the people in it in our first film, The Atom Smashers, that they wanted us to make a new promotional film for them.  The one they currently were using was over ten years old.  Naturally, we were thrilled to do it.  One of the things we discussed in our initial meeting was that they wanted the film to focus not on the Tevatron, that incredible 4-mile in circumference machine that dominated The Atom Smashers, but rather on all the other science done at Fermilab.  Partly, this is because the Tevatron’s life expectancy is short; as we documented in our film, funding and a massive new accelerator at CERN were final nails in the coffin of this 40 year-old machine.  But a main reason is that there are so many fascinating things happening at the lab that aren’t involved in a multi-billion dollar, headline-topping race to find the mysterious answer to life, the universe, and everything that the Higgs boson is reputed to be.  I’ll be profiling those things in upcoming entries.

But back to our shoots at Fermilab.  We were there last week on Daughters and Sons to Work Day (DASTOW, per the scientists’ trend of making pronounceable abbreviations of everything longer than a couple of words) following around neutrino physicist David Schmitz, who performed a really nice show for the kids where things rolled, swung, bumped, and moved (all following Newton’s laws of motion) and then caught up with him as he explained the latest work being done on his experiment, the MINERvA neutrino experiment.  Again, I’ll explain more of this in coming entries, but for now, I’ll just say that he and his group were testing a giant hexagonal … water tank.  That’s right, a plastic hexagonal shape about a foot wide filled with good old water.  Dave was talking on the phone with a couple of colleagues about a recent development: cracks had formed in some of the washers used to bolt the sides together so the thing wouldn’t collapse under the weight of all that water.  They had drained the tank, replaced the washers, and filled it back up with water to see if it would leak.  The ultimate destination for this large water-filled wafer was deep underground, sandwiched between metal plates of the same size, so they didn’t want any chance that it would start leaking at some point in the future.  So Dave hung up the phone and headed over to the big warehouse where it was located and checked out the wafer where it was sitting for three weeks, making sure no cracks appeared in the washers.  Our cinematographer, Stefani, noticed how much of a funhouse-mirror it was to shoot Dave through the water-filled tank, so she got up on a scissor-lift (while three months pregnant — her baby will be a true adventurer) and got some nice shots.

In subsequent posts I’ll be doing a lot more explaining about neutrinos, neutrino detectors, the MINERvA experiment, and the big Questions Fermilab is after (the same ones we’re referencing in our new film for them).  I’ll also describe the other things we’ll be depicting in the film, including the fantastically intriguing Dark Energy Camera destined for the top of a telescope in South America.

Fermilab’s strange architecture

I stumbled across this great blog entry from a writer / photographer team about the peculiar buildings and shapes found at Fermilab.  Rather than sum it up, I’m just going to link to it and say that it has some great pictures, including one thing we never saw that looks like the most beautiful spaceship I’ve ever seen (I think you’ll know it when you see it).  OK, I just had to steal it from their blog and post it here, but do go check out their entry — it’s good reading.

The Science of fireworks

Despite the picture, I realize this is an anti-climactic post for being dormant since February 2, but, hey, you have to ease back into these things.  Here’s a quiz you can take about the science of fireworks.  Sample question: “What is used in fireworks to create smoke clouds?”

Lots has been going on this year.  Will catch you up in the next few entries…