{"id":3705,"date":"2011-05-15T17:06:58","date_gmt":"2011-05-15T21:06:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=3705"},"modified":"2019-09-16T11:39:14","modified_gmt":"2019-09-16T15:39:14","slug":"the-big-bang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=3705","title":{"rendered":"The Big Bang"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a new film out this weekend with a particle physics theme (no string theory), called The Big Bang<\/a>, starring Antonio Banderas. I figured that it’s my duty to cover this kind of popular culture use of particle physics, so went to see the film last night. It took some effort to identify the one screen in New York where it was showing, and the theater contained about 10 people at the Saturday night 8:20 show. If it’s showing in your area (only New York and LA I think) and you want to see it on a big screen, better go very soon.<\/p>\n

I was going to write a review, and mention as many as possible of the various physics inside jokes that appear, but this has been done better here<\/a>, where the film is aptly described as belonging to the genre “nerd noir”, with a “particle physics fetish” sex scene. The film features an LHC-lookalike built underground in New Mexico, designed to search for the Higgs (God Particle). The sex scene mentioned in the review pairs Banderas with a woman with a bubble chamber event and uncertainty principle tatoos. In the throes of passion she discusses Heisenberg uncertainty, entanglement, and the Standard Model.<\/p>\n

There’s more about the film here<\/a>, and Lubos has his take here<\/a>. Rex Reed<\/a> really didn’t like it, and it’s hard to disagree, unless you’re a great fan of particle physics camp in movies.<\/p>\n

Presumably this will be going more or less straight to DVD in a rather short time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a new film out this weekend with a particle physics theme (no string theory), called The Big Bang, starring Antonio Banderas. I figured that it’s my duty to cover this kind of popular culture use of particle physics, so … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3705"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11309,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3705\/revisions\/11309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}