Review of Particle Fever (2013) by Martha G — 22 Mar 2014

First let me say that I'm not a physicist. I took three college physics courses but they dealt mostly with meter sticks flying around at close to the speed of light, so the only intellectual qualification I had for seeing this movie was curiosity. I feel I must also disclose that if it weren't for the fact that the Chicago cops and a suspected murderer were involved in an eight-hour standoff which backed up traffic on the streets surrounding the theater at which the movie I'd originally planned on seeing was playing, I probably would never have seen this one.

"Particle Fever" is a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider built near Geneva, Switzerland by an organization called CERN to collect data to assist physicists in answering some fundamental questions about the universe. The collider consists of a really big underground ring in which particles whiz around in opposite directions and crash into each other at four observation points. It took ten years to build and was finished in 2008, shortly after the documentary crew started filming.

I would be lying if I said I understood everything in this movie. The physicists do their best to dumb things down, but let's face it, there's a pretty big gap between their idea of dumb and my idea of smart. They're all really excited about possibly finding something called a Higgs boson and measuring its mass, which depending on the result, will suggest that one of two competing theories is likely correct: supersymmetry or the multiverse.

Does all of this make sense to me? Of course not. I don't even really know what a boson is, let alone understanding the two theories, but I was nonetheless caught up in the physicists' excitement at each of the big milestones: the first time a particle whizzes around the ring, the first time two particles collide, and the big announcement about what the data shows about the Higgs boson. It made me want to be a physicist. Or at least to be smart enough to be a physicist.

Even if you know nothing at all about physics, you can still appreciate the massive scale of this project and its importance to so many people, some of whom have spent their entire careers working on theories that might finally be proven or disproven because of it. Mr. Higgs himself (yes, there's a Mr. Higgs), is seen tearing up at the announcement about his eponymous particle, which he first postulated the existence of back in 1964.

I found myself on the edge of my seat, eagerly awaiting the outcome of something I knew nothing about before the movie started, cheering for a mass in a range that would indicate supersymmetry because, well I like things to be symmetrical and besides, the guy who believes in multiverses is kind of creepy.

This film may not make you understand particle physics (OK, it definitely won't), but it will probably make you care about it for at least an hour or so. Though the Chicago cops probably wouldn't agree with me, I, for one, am glad that a recalcitrant murder suspect unwittingly steered me towards this movie so I could pretend to be Sheldon Cooper for a while.