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Particle Fever

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Particle Fever (2013)

September. 29,2013
|
7.4
| Documentary
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As the Large Hadron Collider is about to be launched for the first time, physicists are on the cusp of the greatest scientific discovery of all time - or perhaps their greatest failure.

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Scanialara
2013/09/29

You won't be disappointed!

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Vashirdfel
2013/09/30

Simply A Masterpiece

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Micitype
2013/10/01

Pretty Good

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Deanna
2013/10/02

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

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dallasryan
2013/10/03

Particle Fever is an interesting watch in showing what we believe we can prove, what we have proven (or believe we have), what will be disproven (and/or what we believe will be disproven) and everything else in between. Particle Fever proves there is never a solid answer to any of it, and even when the scientists believe they have found the 'God' Particle other scientists will argue that they didn't (outside of the documentary). The real question is not 'What can be proven?', but the real question is 'Can you disprove it?' A documentary worth watching for the debate and concepts

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don2507
2013/10/04

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.

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TxMike
2013/10/05

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.

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eyal philippsborn
2013/10/06

If there's one thing I learned at particle fever, it's probably the fact that Phyiscs is not what I learned in high school. The Physics I studied (and failed miserably) was the calculator of light rays and gravity forces. The real Physics, the one some people choose as their livelihood is, quite literally, a universe away. Some might say multi-verse away. But I'm jumping ahead of myself. The focus of the movie- the Hydron collider in Switzerland is a project according to all projections, should never have materialized. Its costs sky-rocketed to five billion pounds, it took almost twenty years to build and a few more years to overcome glitches (and when you build a seven mile long tunnel to run beams in the speed off light, glitches are inevitable) and it's functional and commercial uses are, as of today, non-existent. It's hard to persuade people to allocate money and time just to get a replay of the big bang. Alas, it's not the Hedron's goal.I'm still jumping ahead.Physics is the most pretentious of scientific fields. Its purpose is to compose the great manual of the universe. A tough assignment considering no one knows how it works, how long it will work or if it was intentionally premeditated to work. CERN, The ultimate place of worship for all physicists, takes the wild theories of the universe and with high powered, heavily documented and shockingly susceptible device, puts them to the test. The one test that CERN failed to anticipate is the test of the real world. When one operate a gigantic, costly collider, you need press coverage, in order to do that, CERN must provide insights. Keeping the experiments clandestine, isolate CERN from the media, making them public, lead to rushed tests that more often than not, fail and alienate the press even more. Apparently, the world outside the Hedron collider is as vicious as the Collider itself.Of course, the Hedron collider overcame all its initial difficulties and supplied the world with shocking insights that leave many questions unanswered. One that, in my opinion, looms over all the rest, is whether or not this manual of the universe was authored or generated by circumstances. In other words, is there a big guy upstairs or is this universe one big exercise in probability. This movie makes you think. beyond the colorful and diverse types of physicists, it projects an image of the universe and forces us to redefine perspective. Now, that's quite an accomplishment for a modest documentary. Don't expect the movie to be easy. It's not for the Physics majors but it's also not digested to be user-friendly. Manuals never are. 8 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter

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