44 | NewScientist | 20 April 2019CULTURE
Chasing Einstein by Steve Brown
and Timothy Wheeler, Ignite Channel,
Sci-Fi-London Film Festival, 19 MaySOME 1.3 billion years ago, in a
galaxy far, far away, two black
holes collided. This cosmic
violence was over in seconds,
but it took until just over three
years ago for its aftershocks to
reach Earth. Or at least, reach
the twin detectors of the Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-
Wave Observatory in the US.
On 14 September 2015, lasers
pinging up and down within
LIGO’s detectors experienced a
tiny flexing in the distance they
were travelling, equivalent to a
hair’s width difference in the
journey to Proxima Centauri,
our next-nearest star.
This first direct detection
of a ripple in space-time – a
gravitational wave – eclipsed even
the discovery of the Higgs boson
by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
It was the crowning triumph of
general relativity, Albert Einstein’s
century-old theory of gravity.
And for the researchers most
associated with the project,
Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip
Thorne, it brought a Nobel prize.
This classic story of rewarding
precision, patience and brain
power bookends Chasing Einstein,
a documentary about big physics
premiering in the UK next month.
Nestled in between is a more
nuanced tale of the motivations
and sacrifices science demands.
There are hard questions.
Does triumph blind us to
failure? And are institutional
conservatism and unquestioning
adherence to established theoriesleading us down a blind alley?
For all its successes, physics of
the LIGO/LHC type is in a funk.
As Barish sums up in the film,
“OK, Einstein was right. Now
what?” General relativity describes
the universe’s larger workings
better than any other theory, but
to make it work, we must accept
that gravity is acting on six times
more matter than we can see.
The so-far futile search for dark
matter is told in Chasing Einstein
through well-chosen “cast
members”. There is James
Beacham, the bullish young
American for whom the failure
to produce dark matter just
means we need a bigger machine.
There is Italian experimentalist
Elena Aprile, who divides her time
between Columbia University in
New York and the caverns of Italy’s
Gran Sasso National Laboratory
as she hunts down dark matter.
Her desire is to follow her hero
Marie Curie and win a Nobel. But
in more unguarded moments, she
is also open about screwing up herrelationship and missing her kids’
birthdays because experiments
demanded all – and how it might
all be better if she could only find
a hint of being on the right track.
If she and Beacham represent
the establishment, Erik Verlinde
and Margot Brouwer are the
insurgents. For all his modesty,
Dutchman Verlinde would like
to be a new Einstein, creating atheory of gravity to render dark
matter redundant. Brouwer is the
new PhD, who would play Arthur
Eddington to Verlinde’s Einstein,
verifying his theory, as Eddington
did for general relativity with his
1919 solar eclipse measurements.
Cree Edwards, a Silicon Valley
entrepreneur, voices the
outsider’s frustration at the
impasse when he cross-examines
Beacham and Verlinde afterinviting them to his Oregon ranch
to observe a total solar eclipse.
There is a lot to like in the film’s
interplay of characters, but it
remains inconclusive in its central
thesis that established ideas
impede new ones.
What is striking is the patience
with which people listen to each
other. Minds are open to change,
even though they might not be
willing or able to deliver it.
The film captures that stasis and
change, the joys and frustrations
of a field with no new answers,
or answers raising new questions.
One scene stands out. Aprile
and her colleagues on the XENON
experiment at Gran Sasso
“unblind” their data to see if
they have found any dark matter.
Their faces say it all, as Nobel
dreams ebb away. It is a reminder
of the nature of science.
Set against that is the privilege
of being able to ask the big
questions. Among them, one is
becoming louder: must Einstein,
the iconoclast, now be toppled? ■In the shadow of Einstein
Is the past blocking new ideas in physics? Richard Webb explores the case made by a new film
Competing physicists enjoy a
solar eclipse together in Oregon
“ One question is
becoming louder: must
Einstein, the iconoclast,
now be toppled?”IGNITECHANNEL^