Particle Fever is a 2013
documentary film tracking the first round of experiments at the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. The film follows the experimental
physicists at CERN who run the experiments, as well as theoretical physicists who
attempt to provide a conceptual framework for the LHC results. The film begins
in 2008 with the first firing of the LHC and concludes in 2012 with the
successful identification of the Higgs Boson.
The subject of the film is the
Large Hadron Collider, a massive miles long particle accelerator designed to
detect the Higgs boson by replicating, miniature, the Big Bang. It works by
smashing together two high-energy proton beams aimed directly at each other.
Comprised of liquid helium cooled magnets and complex microelectronics, the LHC
is the world largest crash test Laboratory.
One doesn’t have to be a physicist
or good at math, to enjoy the energy and thrill of discovery that radiates from
the documentary “Particle Fever”. Mark Levinson, director of the film has taken
a potentially daunting topic, the search for the elusive and highly significant
Higgs Boson particle, also known as “God Particle” and turned it into a movie
that not just accessible but fun, with a surprisingly emotional playoff at the
end.
Real stars of the film are the half
dozen physicists who tell the story of the search for the Higgs Boson, lending
the tech talk real drama. They are led by David Kaplan, a theoretical physicist
at John Hopkins University who acts as a kind of tour guide to the story and
helps simplify a complex subject for a general audience, many of whom would
never otherwise care about any of this. The pursuit of knowledge sake is
science as purest. As Kaplan says, everyone looking for the Higgs particle
always understood that the search could yield nothing, other than understanding
everything.
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