Particle Fever

[3.5 stars] [IMDb Link]

[Amazon Link]
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We've been undergoing a real dearth of movie-watching of late. But Pun Daughter and her boyfriend dragged us out of our rut for a trip to Portsmouth to see Particle Fever at the Music Hall Loft. (Venue review: it was my first time there, the movie was 99 minutes, and the seating in the theatre would not have been tolerable for much more than that.)

Particle Fever is a documentary about the search for the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), just outside of Geneva, straddling the border between France and Switzerland. As a physics major, I appreciated that the movie's heroes are physicists, both theoretical and experimental, the real-life versions of the fictional characters on The Big Bang Theory. We follow a handful of them over a few years, as the LHC approaches its go-live date, and experimental results start to trickle out.

At this level, the physics is difficult for laymen to comprehend. (And me too; I never got more than hand-waving close to the sophisticated theory underpinning the Standard Model of elementary particles.) But the basic idea is simple to understand: you collide protons, moving at 0.999999991c, head-on into each other, easily overcoming their normal electric repulsion, let them rip each other apart, and examine what flies out of the collisions. You would never see a Higgs Boson directly, but what you do see would strongly imply its existence and properties.

The movie understandably glosses over the details of the physics, just lets the physicists talk, occasionally scrawling incomprehensible formulae and Feynman diagrams on chalkboards. Neither is there an effort to go beyond superficial descriptions of the experimental setup. (The moviemakers probably correctly judged at what point their audience's eyes would start glazing over.) There is some mumbo-jumbo about What It All Means: if the Higgs is found, then its observed mass makes various theories of supersymmetry and multiverses either more or less likely, which has implications for (yes) the Big Bang Theory, and how the universe will either end, or not.

There is heartbreak, caused by an accident that destroys some of the accelerator's superconducting magnets, causing a shutdown of over a year. But there's also triumph as the two independent teams searching for the Higgs present their results, with Peter Higgs himself in the audience. (Spoiler: yes, they found it.)

Quibble: The movie takes shots at the US's cancellation of its own big-physics machine, the Superconducting Supercollider near Waxahachie, Texas. Brief C-SPAN clips from 1993 of a couple of GOP Congresscritters are shown decrying the expenditure of billions on the facility; the movie wants us to jeer at the ignorant yahoos (and the Portsmouth audience complied, of course) carrying out the long-running Republican War on Science!

But that's a mistaken impression. Democrats were in control of the House when the SSC funding was cut, the termination was orchestrated by Jim Slattery, a House Democrat from Kansas, and the Congressional votes were bipartisan. The movie's story in this area is a drive-by cheap shot.

Other than that, the movie is very watchable, competently put together, imaginative at times, funny at others, occasionally visually stunning.


Last Modified 2024-02-02 5:20 AM EDT