francoface "Particle Fever" is an excellent view into the workings and development of how physicists come from elementary basic principles to a greater understanding of the Universe as well as our world in general. If a rising student can't find this presentation to peak one's interest then maybe nothing will.

rohit_kaa Modern particle physics can be expressed succinctly in a single piece of paper, but it would take years for the uninitiated to decipher it. This documentary brings one no closer to the inscrutable utterances of that page nor does it try to. What it aims at doing and what it succeeds in is depicting the emotion that drives the people to take on unthinkable tasks and work on it indomitably for decades on end to see some semblance of a result. It brings you closer to the heart of a scientist or an artist and try's to show the fundamental driving force of human endeavor. This is a beautiful piece of film making, and I heavily recommend you, whoever you are, whatever time you are in, wherever you be to watch this , because its worth it .

don2507 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.

Miles-10 I am a layman and like to think of myself as an intelligent one. So, as I predicted in my headline, I like this movie, even though I have reservations. "Particle Fever" is about a labor intensive physics experiment--that involved many thousands of scientists, lasted from 2007 to 2012 and is actually still on-going. The fact that I watched this film in a format where I could stop and replay gave me an advantage over theater-goers whose reviews say that they could not follow much of the science. I got some things by listening to them twice whereas I might not have otherwise.I like the people aspect of the movie. Monica Dunford is just the cutest, tomboyish experimental (hands-on) physicist. Aside from having the most fabulous name, Fabiola Gianotti is proof that C.P. Snow was exaggerating when he said art is art and science is science and the twain shan't meet. Wrong. As well as being a top physicist, Fabiola was a classical musician and a passionate student of classic literature before she decided to go into science. Savas Dimopoulos is a font of wisdom whether acknowledging that theoretical physics is as much art as it is science or contrasting the act of making a cup of gourmet coffee (if it doesn't come out right you can try again in a few minutes) with physics (if your theory doesn't work out, then you've wasted thirty or forty years of your life).I don't remember who was who, but I enjoyed the humor of several of the scientists, especially the physicist who explained to an audience that there are two answers to the question of why they are conducting this experiment, the one they tell people and real one--not so much because their trying to hide something as they don't think the real reason would make much sense to most people.Then there is the very human moment when the "final" results are being released to a huge audience, and the man for whom the particle is named, Peter Higgs, is brought in and seated, but Monica Dunford points out that he has been given a less choice seat than her colleague's research assistant. At least he is inside. Dimopoulos is left out in the hallway, unable to get a seat at all even though he is a well-known physicist who has spent three decades writing about the Higgs particle.Despite not being a scientist, I have actually been to CERN, more than 25 years ago. It was pleasing to me to see the facilities and surrounding countryside.Although I learned some things about the science from this film, I am afraid I learned enough to understand why some nay-saying physicists do not think CERN's claim to have discovered the Higgs boson is correct and that the particle has not been found. The mass of the found particle surprised the scientists because it was around 125 or 126 GeV instead of the expected 115 or 140, the extremes hoped for by each of two competing theories. A number almost half way in between seems neither to confirm nor disprove either theory. Tienzien Gong has claimed that the reason for this is that they discovered not the Higgs boson but the "vacuum" boson, which an earlier physicist had predicted would have a mass of 125.4 GeV. So Gong thinks CERN's claim of success and the Nobel Prize awarded to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs are premature. But I throw cold water on an otherwise entertaining and informative movie.