Particle Fever
| Particle Fever | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster
|
|
| Directed by | Mark Levinson |
| Produced by |
|
| Starring |
|
| Narrated by | David Kaplan |
| Music by | Robert Miller |
| Cinematography | Claudia Raschke-Robinson |
| Edited by | Walter Murch |
|
Production
company |
Anthos Media
|
| Distributed by |
|
|
Release date
|
|
|
Running time
|
99 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1.4 million |
| Box office | $869,838 |
Particle Fever is a 2013 American documentary film tracking the first round of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. The film follows the experimental physicists at CERN who run the experiments, as well as the theoretical physicists who attempt to provide a conceptual framework for the LHC's results. The film begins in 2008 with the first firing of the LHC and concludes in 2012 with the successful identification of the Higgs boson.
The Communication Awards of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine awarded a $20,000 prize for excellence in communicating science to the general public in Film/Radio/TV to David Kaplan and Mark Levinson for "Particle Fever" on October 14, 2015. The awards are given to individuals in four categories: books, film/radio/TV, magazine/newspaper and online, and are supported by the W. M. Keck Foundation..
The film is composed of two narrative threads. One follows the large team of experimental physicists at CERN as they try to get the LHC running properly. After a promising initial test run, the LHC suffers a liquid helium leak in 2007 that damages its electromagnets. Fabiola Gianotti, Martin Aleksa, and Monica Dunford are all shown discussing how to handle the negative publicity surrounding the accident, and how to proceed. After repairs in 2009, the LHC begins to run experiments again at half power.
The other thread follows the competing theories of Nima Arkani-Hamed and his mentor Savas Dimopoulos. In the film, Arkani-Hamed advocates for the "multiverse" theory, which predicts the mass of the Higgs boson to be approximately 140 giga-electronvolts. Dimopoulos argues for the more-established supersymmetry theory, which predicts the mass of the Higgs boson to be approximately 115 GeV.
...
Wikipedia