Particlefever documentary

ABOUT

Imagine being able to watch as Edison turned on the first light bulb, or as Franklin received his first jolt of electricity.

For the first time, a film gives audiences a front row seat to a significant and inspiring scientific breakthrough as it happens. Particle Fever follows six brilliant scientists during the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, marking the start-up of the biggest and most expensive experiment in the history of the planet, pushing the edge of human innovation.

As they seek to unravel the mysteries of the universe, 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries joined forces in pursuit of a single goal: to recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang and find the Higgs boson, potentially explaining the origin of all matter. But our heroes confront an even bigger challenge: have we reached our limit in understanding why we exist?

Directed by Mark Levinson, a physicist turned filmmaker, and masterfully edited by Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), Particle Fever is a celebration of discovery, revealing the very human stories behind this epic machine.

 

So the best $6 I ever spent in my life I spent yesterday seeing the documentary “Particle Fever,” which is about an hour and a half long, about the Large Hadron Collider experiment.

 

Leo: Ooh, I want to see that.

 

Steve: And, Leo, it is still in theaters. My local theaters have it for, like, the rest of this week. So it got, on IMDB, an 8.1 out of 10 from 211 users. The critics’ meta score is 87/100. The New York Times gave it 100. The Hollywood Reporter gave it 100. The Village Voice and Time Out New York both gave it 100, as did the Globe and Mail. And I’ll share just three one-line summaries.NPR said “It’s jaw-droppingly cool stuff, explained with admirable clarity by an affable physicist tour guide, David Kaplan, and wedded to the tale of a massive technological undertaking like nothing in history.” And they quote one scientist saying: “The biggest machine ever built by human beings.” And NPR finished, saying: “And it’s flat-out thrilling.”

The Hollywood Reporter said: “‘Particle Fever’ succeeds on every level, but none more important than in making the normally intimidating and arcane world of genius-level physics at least conceptually comprehensible and even friendly to the lay viewer.”

And lastly, Globe and Mail said: “Their excitement is infectious, and the entire endeavor is both mind-bending and tremendously human. Near the end, Peter Higgs, the recently Nobel Prize winner” – of course the Higgs-Boson is named after him, and this is what they were searching for – “and one of the scientists who first predicted the particle back in 1964, is seen in Switzerland watching the data results come in while a tear trickles down….”

 

Particle Fever

Leo: Oh, I’d love to see that, yeah.

 

Steve: And Leo, I mean, I had tears in my eyes. This documentary, this was inside the project. When you look at the list of so-called “actors,” it’s all the physicists. And it says, “Played by himself,” “Played by herself,” “Played by himself,” “Played by herself.” I mean, the entire piece is, I mean, like Princeton physicists, Stanford physicists, Italians, Germans, Israelis, Iraqis. The point was made that this knows no national boundaries. Scientists from countries at war with each other are all there.And so somebody was rolling a camera all through this, interviewing the physicists about what this means. So basically for an hour and a half we follow through the dream and the construction and those first stumbles that some of us will remember where there was a leak and a catastrophe. And then, like, they’re arguing about whether to tell the truth to the media about when they are going to turn it on or not because they’re so worried they’re going to stumble, and to have the world’s cameras watching them stumble. And so it’s like the – it’s pure science.

And then there’s the other distinction made between the theorists and the experimentalists. And that line is drawn clearly, and you hear them each talking about each other. Oh, it’s just – I cannot overstate how incredible it is. There is a site, ParticleFever.com, where thanks to Simon Zerafa, who shot that to me this morning, where you can go and see the couple-minutes-long trailer for it, if you can still find it. There is a list there of the theaters that have it, and it’s in the major cities around. If it’s near you, oh, my god, it’s worth it not to wait till the summer. It will be out in HD and on disk this summer. You want to run this, Leo?

 

Leo: Should I run the audio for it?

 

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

 

Leo: All right.[Clip]

 

Leo: Do they talk about next year’s experiment? Because that’s interesting, too.[Clip]

 

Leo: Wow, that’s a nice shot.[Clip]

 

Leo: That’s Higgs.[Clip]

 

Leo: Wow.[Clip]

 

Leo: I can’t wait to see this.[Clip]

 

Leo: “Particle Fever.” Wow.

 

Steve: Yeah.

 

Leo: But it’s not over for the LHC. They’ve got much more to do. We were talking with Michio Kaku about the next experiment, which may be just as significant. It’s really remarkable. It’s really exciting.

 

Steve: Yup, yup. So we’ll definitely have this available this summer. But if it’s in a theater near you, I mean, I was – I’m not sure yet that I won’t be going there because I think I have to see this thing. I think I have to stand in it and look around.

 

Leo: Yeah, you know? We should do a field trip.

 

Steve: I was going to say that…

 

Leo: Let’s do a TWiT field trip.

 

Steve: …planned ahead, we would announce to everybody when we’re going to be there, and anyone who wants to join us would be welcome to because I can’t imagine a better place to have a little informal get-together.

 

Leo: It’s actually showing just down the road apiece.

 

Steve: Oh, Leo. I’m not kidding.

 

Leo: I’m going to go see it, yeah.

 

Steve: I’m not kidding. And it may disappear on Friday.

 

Leo: Well, it comes Friday. So we’re probably getting your old print. And it leaves Sunday. So it’s a three-day engagement in San Rafael. So, yeah. But this is all on the website, ParticleFever.com. So you can see where it is. And of course we’ll be able to see it someday.

 

Steve: Yeah. This summer.

 

Leo: Home systems.

 

Steve: The site says that it’ll be available. So no one will have – and I will certainly let everyone know when that happens. But, wow, it’s just, oh. It was, I mean, what was really interesting is that, as somebody who’s been involved in creating stuff – and, for example, I no longer tell – I no longer try to guess when something’s finished. Someone says, “When’s this going to be done?” I have no idea. So I could relate so well to the dilemma that the scientists were in with $8 billion spent and this incredible worldwide energy, and then the press all, you know, not understanding at all that this is not like plugging in your coffee pot and it brews, I mean, no one has ever built one of these before. What’s going to happen when we turn it on?And so they made the greatest – they did a perfect job of illustrating that tension that exists between real experimental theoretical physics out on the far edge and the lack of understanding that anyone who isn’t in that mode of going where we’ve never gone before, you don’t know what is ahead. Which I argue is what makes the journey so fun.

 

Leo: Yeah, right.

 

Steve: But it annoys the media because they don’t know how to reduce it to a sound bite.

 

Leo: Right. Can’t win.

 

Steve: Yeah. So, yeah. “Particle Fever.” If you can see it, see it.

 

Steve Gibson shared with us from his Security Now 450: How the Heartbleeds show on the Twit network.