Higgs[author-post-rating] (3/5)

Jan van den Berg’s Higgs is more of a personalised lecture than a piece of theatre, but that is not necessarily a negative thing. Taking us through the way in which his own love of particle physics – in particular neutrinos – grew, he explains his journey and the theories behind the Higgs and other such particles. It’s hardly groundbreaking performance lecture-ism, but for a popular science geek like me, it tickles certain intellectual quarters which have yet to be touched at the festival.

The opening section of the piece considers the divisibility of units, with our lecturer using an anthology of communities in both Papua New Guinea and his home town to demonstrate that, whenever you think you’ve got to the smallest unit, you can still divide further (village, family, individual, etc). Democritus’s “There is nothing except atoms and empty space. Everything else is opinion” is corrected – after it’s explained that atoms are actually smaller than he thought and vacuums are actually full of stuff – to “There is nothing”. This story is of his quest to find out what makes up that nothing.

Using video clips, pictures, anecdotes and a plethora of facts (protons whizz round the Large Hadron Collider 11,000 times per second), we learn of scientists trying to find what gives particles mass and the ever-elusive-but-now-probably-certain Higgs Boson. Along the way, he makes a film of the whole thing which was never properly finished as it was released before the Big Discovery. This, therefore, acts as an epilogue.

And then, later, it gets a little weirder, as we get to see a strand of Peter Higgs’s hair which van den Berg proudly displays, and then are forced to think about proton porn happening in little packets in the LHC. A loud, throbbing ending then reminds us of the power it takes to find these things, and we are left slightly in awe of the stories which are made when knowledge is sought.

Higgs is at Summerhall until 17 August. For more information and tickets visit the Edinburgh Fringe website.