Particle Fever (2013)

Don't watch if you want to learn anything. About 5 minutes of the film is spent on hard science, the remainder is spent on a mediocre feel-good documentary. Read the Wiki page instead. Apparently my review needs more lines to be accepted. Don't read any further. I'm just writing text to fill in IMDb quota. I've said all I want to say about the film. This is getting tedious. Am I done yet? Nope, I need to keep typing. If you've read this far, you're wasting your time. Maybe I'm done now... Nope. I'm going to keep typing. I still don't have enough lines of text. IMDb, if you're reading this, this quota is ridiculous. Still not enough... I don't have 10 lines worth of stuff to say about this film!! Why make me write 10 lines of worthless garbage when all I had to say was worth three! You're wasting my time and the review readers. This is why I use the spoiled vegetable website to get legitimate reviews instead.

The Large Hadron Collider is a gigantic experimental apparatus, conceived in an attempt to discover the fundamental particles that make up the universe. This documentary about it is relatively light on the physics: in concentrates on the hopes of some of the scientists working on it, conveying their innate excitement for their subject rather than the technical details of how and why. But it does convey some of the reasons why this work is (at least theoretically) important: the Higgs Bosun, the previously elusive particle that was target number one for the LHC, is central to modern physical models of the universe; and moreover, determining its mass would help us choose between two broader theories: one is which the universe exists in a state of perfect symmetry, and the other in which it is just one of a huge array of universes, each with their own peculiar properties. And I think the documentary succeeds in inducing its audience to share these concerns. How this relates to the world as we perceive it on a daily basis is very unclear; but the urge to understand is something very fundamental in our humanity, and 'Particle Fever' conveys this well.

Wow, this movie is a poster child for what's wrong with big budget science. At the beginning they show clips of conservative members of congress, who are arguing that the American version of CERN should be defunded. I'm sure this was intended to be a hit/slam, but I found myself agreeing with the politicians. For the record, I'm a science geek, with a degree in engineering, who reads books about quantum mechanics for fun (David Deutsch in particular is my favorite author).The female lead, well, she was super-impressed by a 5 story structure. Kaplan, one of the male leads, comes off as very unlikable, although I warmed up to him by the end of the movie. Then there's the guy who won't collaborate with more than 2 colleagues, but Nobel prizes can only be given to a most 3 people. Great, this guy's ego is so big that he'll sacrifice science to protect his reputation. There's very little science here beyond what's in the headlines. Basically, all this money was spent on CERN, they were expecting the Higgs to be in one of two places, but they found something (it must be the Higgs!) in a different place, therefore it's pretty much back to the drawing board. Perhaps science is at its limits - but you know what, Einstein didn't need an expensive CERN to know that general relativity was true. Yes, something is WAY off here, and this movie just solidifies that for me.I'd give this movie more stars if it could actually tell me WHY a Higgs imparts mass to other particles (or anything interesting!) because the personalities of the people they interviewed were simply not interesting to me.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, has been in the works for over 20 years, from concept to construction to operation. This is one of those projects that cannot be described in monetary terms, i.e. "cost/benefit." No, it is one of those fundamental experimental projects that will hopefully uncover new insights into sub-atomic particle Physics and allow us to better explain how our universe works.The LHC has many goals, but an early primary goal was to experimentally verify the Peter Higgs theory that there must exist a heavy particle called a "boson", usually referred to as the Higgs boson, which is the linchpin for all other particles. The only way to possibly observe it is to bombard the small particles at very high energies and using giant, sophisticated specialty detectors look at the resulting new particles and their energies. When I first learned this film is more than 90 minutes long I wondered why. But I found out as I watched it, instead of being a dry scientific and engineering account of the LHC, much of the film featured several of the Physicists either working directly to build it or working secondarily to analyze data and interpret results. Overall I found it to be a good balance, to learn more about the people and what kinds of thoughts and apprehensions they had as zero hour approached.As the film documents, all went fine and the LHC began working as designed ... until a rather catastrophic failure resulted in a leak and the destruction of some of the critical parts of the LHC. It had to be shut down for several months and repaired, all before it was able to generate any useful data.Then, in 2011 and 2012, after it started up and ran fine, the critical experiments were performed, and the results were presented to a small live audience and the worldwide audience by teleconference and TV. Two competing theories had established that the boson will have a mass of either 115 GEV or 140 GEV. When the massive amount of data was analyzed and verified to 5 sigma, meaning the chance of an incorrect result was less than about 1 in 3 million, the Higgs boson was discovered, at a mass of about 125 to 126. Almost right in the middle of the two predicted either/or values.So that opens up a potentially totally new and exciting set of theories about how the universe was formed and how it behaves. Hopefully after the LHC is set up to run at full design power, new data will shed additional light on the issue. I can't wait!It was a joyous sight to see Peter Higgs himself at the news conference announcing the results. One can only imagine how he must have felt, after so many years and so much effort seeing his ground-breaking theoretical work verified.