It takes the world’s largest machine to study the world’s smallest things. As large as a five-story building, the Large Hadron Collider was constructed in an underground tunnel over a 20-year period near the Geneva headquarters of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). (A similar project in Texas had been defunded midway through construction.) The idea was to smash subatomic particles together in a simulation of conditions present in the first moments after the Big Bang, with the hope that doing so would produce the long-hypothesized Higgs boson, which in turn would confirm scientific theories that had been coalescing since the early 1960s.
Make sense? Not to worry, this documentary leaves the hardest science in background shots of equations on chalkboards, focusing instead on the “particle fever” of the scientists who have, in many cases, waited decades for their ideas to be confirmed (or shot down). To be sure, there is some talk about the Higgs particle and what it means, but more about the “fever” of the scientists. Director Mark Levinson picks half a dozen of them to follow, most prominently Americans David Kaplan and Monica Dunford. Representing the theoretical side of physics, Kaplan provides, among other things, a really clear explanation of the multiverse, the still-speculative idea that our universe is one of many, each with a different set of fundamental properties. Dunford is a super-enthusiastic graduate student who’s more involved with the practical side of things.
Of course, “practical” is meant in a relative sense here. The most amazing thing about the giant Collider may be that billions of dollars were spent on it without the certainty that it would produce anything other than knowledge for its own sake, though also proof that thousands of people from dozens of countries could cooperate to figure out answers to the most fundamental scientific questions.
IMDb link
viewed 3/29/14 1:05 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/30/14
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