Particle Fever + Q&A 18

Director
Mark Levinson

Producer
David Kaplan
Mark Levinson
Andrea Miller
Carla Solomon

Country
United States

Year
2013

Duration
99 MINS

The press got their good story. Eagerly awaited for decades by the world’s top physicists, the turning on of the Large Hadron Collider in 2008 was a monumental feat – the start-up of the biggest and most expensive experiment in the history of science. The future of an entire field hinged upon determining if the Higgs boson, the so-called “God” particle, existed. But the discovery of the Higgs last year after a near catastrophic breakdown of the machine, is not the simple happy ending anyone “inside” expected. Directed by Mark Levinson, a physicist turned filmmaker, and masterfully edited by Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Part III), Particle Fever tracked the experimental physicists who built the machine and the theoretical physicists whose ideas it would test, revealing a far more complex and interesting underlying story. For these stakeholders, shown intimately here for the first time, the ending to their thirty-year search for answers remains incomplete. Nature has provided a provocative twist in the road to the age-old search for why we are here.