Rebecca Mead, in a recent NEW YORKER article, writes about Walter Murch, film editor and sound designer (Apocalypse Now and English Patient) who is working now on a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider, which, among other things, has been used to prove the existence of the Higgs field and the Higgs boson particle.
When asked whether his work on the film has led to a greater reverence for the universe, Murch replied:
"I think of a Muriel Rukeyser quote, where she says the universe is made of stories, not of atoms. The tension is between finding ever more detail about atomic structure, and the story. It could be the equivalent of somebody looking at an old film, and realizing that the film came from a projector, and discovering that there is an image in the projector, and that it's made of molecules of grains of film, thinking, If I finally get to the heart of that, will it tell me where my story comes from? While we know these are two separate universes."
"It may be that our story, whatever that is - existence -- depends on the Higgs boson and atoms, but it depends on it the way the film depends on the molecular structure of the celluloid. That just happens to be the medium through which it is manifest, but the story predates the film and, in fact, actually created the film itself."
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