On the evening of October 1st. 2014, the UMass ATLAS group presented the acclaimed documentary film “Particle Fever” at the local cinema, Amherst Cinema. A packed audience (sold out 24 hours prior to the showing) followed a group of theorists and experimentalists on the ATLAS experiment as they passed from the early days of the start-up of the LHC to the climactic announcement, on 4 July 2012, of the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson. Profs. Brau, Dallapiccola and Willocq, joined by special guest Nobel Laureate Prof. Sheldon Glashow, led a 45-minute Q&A session after the film. The audience asked a number of great questions! Details of the Q&A, here

Video clip highlights from the Q&A:

• What do you think of the multiverse concept? Glashow responds unequivocally that, being untestable, non-falsifiable and motivated by anthropic arguments, it is not good science. Other prominent physicists would disagree (a panel of physicists hotly debate the topic here). What do you think?
• What are your thoughts on the Nobel Prize awarded to Higgs and Englert, for discovery of the mechanism responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking? Should the experimental collaborations at CERN, ATLAS and CMS, have been awarded the prize for having made the discovery of the Higgs boson? Video here.