We discovered matter. We discovered what that matter was made up of. But we still have that age old question: what created the matter in the first place? Physicists of all cultures have been working for years on trying to decipher this mystery of the universe, and their work has accumulated to create the Large Hadron Collider, a miles-long particle accelerator which essentially recreates the events of the Big Bang in a controlled environment.
When initiated, the LHC sends two beams of protons in opposite directions and moves their paths to collide. In 2012, physicists tested the Hadron Collider for the first time, unsure of what the results would be but knowing that they would make or break the study of physics. Their hope was to find the Higgs boson, the theorized "god particle" that holds all life together... And depending on what they discovered about the Higgs boson from these tests, everything humankind has ever known about physics could be turned on its head. Particle Fever immerses us into the experience right alongside these hardworking men and women as they put the Hadron Collider into action.
I, for one, am not a scientist. I did not do very well with physics in school, and I can grasp basic concepts, but the details are lost on me. The beauty of this documentary is that you don't need to be a scientist to understand the energy that has been captured here on camera. We are navigated through the process by a selection of theoretical physicists and experimental physicists who describe the excitement of the event as it unfolds, not unlike "a room full of six-year-olds whose birthday is next week". These interviews are paired with animated sketches and diagrams which help explain the nature of the testing, and allow the main bulk of the documentary to focus on the physicists' experiences, and not just a mess of scientific jargon that would be lost on the lay. You feel their excitement, their agitation when something goes wrong... their anticipation for just exactly what they will discover.
The benefits of conducting this experiment are quite simple. As David Kaplan, a theoretical physicist from John Hopkins University, explains, there is no realized economic gain in carrying out this experiment. Finding the Higgs boson may not save lives or make everyday life easier -- in fact, potentially nothing could come from this project, "other than understanding everything." No, these physicists are here for the pursuit of knowledge, and nothing less.
Come check out Particle Fever this week at the Midtown Cinema!
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