Walter Murch and the Music of the Higgs Boson

The media landscape is as fluid and changing as the advanced scientific theories that underpin technological gains. In From the Godfather to the God Particle Walter Murch discusses the marriage of those two worlds and his role in the documentary film Particle Fever. Murch, an immensely accomplished film editor and director, is known for his use of musical scores in highlighting the themes and rationales of dramatic films. His work in The Godfather, Apocolypse Now, and The English Patient shows through in Particle Fever. The musical score of the documentary defines the drama of thousands of engineers and physicists in their effort to capture a quantitative understanding of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle and a fundamental part of the standard model of particle physics.

The documentary itself encompassed the work of the Large Hadron Collider, a $10 billion structure that was built to dig deeper into the theories of advanced physics. The 500 hours of film taken over 7 years is indicative of the breadth of the project itself, but the importance of Murch’s influence in the final product is largely understated. The Higgs boson is just one aspect of a very complicated theory of particle physics, something that isn’t conceptual to the average documentary audience. To capture the drama of the story, while still defining the meaning of the Higgs boson for the audience, Murch used pop music and visual art from the 1960’s to equate this understanding to the audience the same way the scientists involved in the work interpret the data of the Large Hadron Collider1. The data they use is largely digital since the work they are involved in occurs on a very small scale. Similarly, the way modern documentary audiences receive their media is digital. Digital data can easily be converted to sound. Scientists exploring the presence of the Higgs boson make use of this by converting complex spreadsheets and graphs to sound in order to understand the complex events occurring within the Large Hadron Collider. Murch mirrored this approach with his musical score in order to simplify a very complex scientific concept.

Bibliography

Murch, Walter, dir. From the Godfather to the God Particle. Sheffield: Sheffield Doc/Fest, 2013.