This is a fascinating documentary about the building, operating, and research results of the world's largest, and probably most complex "machine", the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, otherwise known to us laymen as an "atom smasher." As the film depicts, the LHC accelerates protons to near the speed of light (according to CERN each proton traverses the 17-mile loop of the LHC in over 11,000 times per second!) and then directs the two proton beams into a collision that releases extraordinary amounts of energy that resembles the energy level at the birth of the universe (the Big Bang). The LHC is then able to detect micro particles that are created from these extremely energetic collisions and that exist for only a fleeting fraction of a second but whose existence provides clues to the fundamental nature of our world. Much of the research revealed in this film deals with the hopes of detecting the Higgs Boson particle, a fundamental particle whose existence is said to explain why matter has mass but that has never been detected until the LHC arrived.
You don't have to be a physicist (I'm not) to enjoy this film; all a viewer needs is a healthy and very human curiosity about the nature of our world to appreciate the nature of the discoveries the physicists in this film are uncovering. I don't understand all the physics, e.g., super-symmetry, but the filmmakers have focused on the human personalities and motivations of these scientists to allow us to understand and appreciate much of their esoteric research. Essentially, we have a film about the largest and most expensive scientific apparatus ever built that reveals sub-atomic particles that may exist for only a nanosecond, thus "The Biggest of Science on the Smallest of Scales." I was particularly intrigued by the film's separate treatment of theoretical physicists and experimental physicists with their different work styles, personalities, and seeming rivalry. The theoretical physicists are seen deriving their lofty ideas via advanced mathematics on various blackboards (think Einstein), while the experimental physicists are busy designing the apparatus that will generate the "data sets" used to confirm or refute the theories. I got the impression that the experimental physicists, some of them at least, felt that they were subordinate physicists compared to the theoreticians. One of the most engaging scientists in the film is Monica Dunford an experimentalist whose lively personality and enthusiasm for the experimental research at CERN is highlighted by her recollection that when she revealed to a physicist colleague that she wanted to go into experimental physics, his response was: "why do you want to hammer things?" But of course, an earlier CERN physicist reminds us that Galileo was an experimentalist.
This is a film about a huge science undertaking that might resemble a well-done film on the WW II Manhattan Project, an equally huge scientific undertaking. The difference was that the Manhattan Project was top-secret and focused on using nature's forces to construct a bomb of horrendous destructiveness, while "Particle Fever" is an open and very public look of the efforts of some of our smartest scientists to reveal the fundamental nature of our universe.
You don't have to be a physicist (I'm not) to enjoy this film; all a viewer needs is a healthy and very human curiosity about the nature of our world to appreciate the nature of the discoveries the physicists in this film are uncovering. I don't understand all the physics, e.g., super-symmetry, but the filmmakers have focused on the human personalities and motivations of these scientists to allow us to understand and appreciate much of their esoteric research. Essentially, we have a film about the largest and most expensive scientific apparatus ever built that reveals sub-atomic particles that may exist for only a nanosecond, thus "The Biggest of Science on the Smallest of Scales." I was particularly intrigued by the film's separate treatment of theoretical physicists and experimental physicists with their different work styles, personalities, and seeming rivalry. The theoretical physicists are seen deriving their lofty ideas via advanced mathematics on various blackboards (think Einstein), while the experimental physicists are busy designing the apparatus that will generate the "data sets" used to confirm or refute the theories. I got the impression that the experimental physicists, some of them at least, felt that they were subordinate physicists compared to the theoreticians. One of the most engaging scientists in the film is Monica Dunford an experimentalist whose lively personality and enthusiasm for the experimental research at CERN is highlighted by her recollection that when she revealed to a physicist colleague that she wanted to go into experimental physics, his response was: "why do you want to hammer things?" But of course, an earlier CERN physicist reminds us that Galileo was an experimentalist.
This is a film about a huge science undertaking that might resemble a well-done film on the WW II Manhattan Project, an equally huge scientific undertaking. The difference was that the Manhattan Project was top-secret and focused on using nature's forces to construct a bomb of horrendous destructiveness, while "Particle Fever" is an open and very public look of the efforts of some of our smartest scientists to reveal the fundamental nature of our universe.