La fièvre des particules

This is one of the two or three best documentaries I've ever seen. We were so lucky to see an advance screening at our movie preview club.

It's hard to believe that a documentary about particle physics and the Hadron collider could be dramatic, suspenseful, even thrilling. It's just as hard to make the subject matter - the creation and operation of a huge facility in Switzerland for the purpose of colliding sub-atomic particles at great speed to search for clues about the universe - both intelligible and accessible. Yet this film has brilliantly done both.

Accessibility is achieved partly through clear explanations from particle physicist (and co-producer) David Kaplan and other theoretical physicists, and several experimental physicists who work at the collider. Even more compelling are the clear, beautiful, and simple-to-understand graphics that accompany these explanations. Indeed, the great graphics begin right from the opening credits. All this is enhanced by the editing of multi-Oscar-winner Walter Murch.

The drama comes from the efforts of the experimentalists to prove the theorists' ideas true - especially the existence of the "Higgs boson," the crucial particle of modern physics. The drama is enhanced by presenting a pleasant cast of surprisingly normal, friendly (and, of course, super-smart) physicists who have strong rooting interests in the outcome the way some of us might root for a sports team - but with so much more at stake. There's even tension (albeit friendly) between the "multi-universe" and "dual symmetry" camps.

Watch this film and you'll understand these phrases and so much more. I learned more than I ever thought I could. And in the most pleasant, enthusiastic, accessible way possible.

The main focus of this film is the interaction of scientists with the LHC and its data. Many shots are either banter in the CERN offices or YouTube-like video contributions from scientists themselves. Basically, it adds a human element to what you might read in the news. The engineering of the LHC is scarcely touched upon, and while the film (directed by a physicist) attempts to explain the consequences for particle physics, its dramatized overview is not really accurate; the viewer would be advised to read Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble With Physics". The substitution of pictures of difficult-looking math equations for real scientific exposition became irritating. Furthermore, while we see people interacting with each other in a superficial way, the film doesn't really dig into the culture of theoretical physics -- for example, I enjoyed a shot where physicists discuss how rumors are displacing older methods of data distribution like the arXiv, but the context of this discussion was not given and I worried most of the audience would not understand it.

I subtract four stars for lack of depth and would probably extract more, except that the screening I went to had an interview with the director afterwards, and I realized from him that it was quite difficult for this documentary to achieve what it did. The science the LHC produces comes in the form of millions of spreadsheets full of numbers, which must be analyzed by thousands of experimental physicists sitting at computers around the world. It is rather hard to make a long documentary film about people analyzing numbers on computers. The director made a number of clever stylistic decisions, like mainly interviewing people who were physically present at the CERN buildings, and separating the segments of experimental and theoretical physicists. To get theoretical physics onto the big screen in a thoughtful and entertaining way is really an accomplishment in itself. It was also pointed out that the documentary skillfully focused on a few likable subjects among many to give a hint of the vast size of the project. All in all, the film is a decent portrayal of the kind of willpower and teamwork that is needed on a project the size of the LHC, but don't go to it expecting to gain a very deep knowledge of today's physics or the scientific community.

This is a documentary that physicists will love, as will others who really love science. It's the kind of film that carefully explains the difference between theoretical and experimental physicists. If that kind of distinction interests you, then you will like the film. A lot of physics jargon is tossed around in this film with no explanation so you need to bring a working knowledge of particle physics if you want to fully understand the discussions. If you don't know what a GeV is and that lack of knowledge is going to bother you, then you will not like this film. If you enjoy an explanation of the opposing physics theories of supersymmetry and the multiverse, then this is your film. Also, if math scares you, there are blackboards and whiteboards full of some of the hairiest equations you're likely to see. If you find such things frightening, just turn away.

However, if you'd like to meet people who have staked 10, 20, 30, even 40 years of their career on the moment when the ATLAS team finally announced "We've got it!", then this film is for you. This film paints an accurate though relatively lightweight picture of the years spent making the world's largest machine, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), operational and then confirming the existence of the Higgs boson 40 years after it was predicted in theory. It's exciting to see scores of smart people stretching their brains to the limit so that they can understand something truly fundamental about the universe.

Although billions of particles were smashed in the LHC experiments needed to confirm the Higgs, you will mostly see calm scenes of crops growing in the LHC's vicinity. There are no car chases or crashes, no battling giant robots, no aliens. There are just lots of smart people saying highly intelligent things, most of the time. When they drop into small talk or take time out to brew an espresso, it's actually jarring. (At least it was to me.) About the audience: There were about 40 people in the movie showing I attended on a Sunday afternoon. Every single one of them looked like they had an advanced degree in physics or some other hard science. Indeed, that's who this movie is made for.

The Large Hadron Collider is a gigantic experimental apparatus, conceived in an attempt to discover the fundamental particles that make up the universe. This documentary about it is relatively light on the physics: in concentrates on the hopes of some of the scientists working on it, conveying their innate excitement for their subject rather than the technical details of how and why. But it does convey some of the reasons why this work is (at least theoretically) important: the Higgs Bosun, the previously elusive particle that was target number one for the LHC, is central to modern physical models of the universe; and moreover, determining its mass would help us choose between two broader theories: one is which the universe exists in a state of perfect symmetry, and the other in which it is just one of a huge array of universes, each with their own peculiar properties. And I think the documentary succeeds in inducing its audience to share these concerns. How this relates to the world as we perceive it on a daily basis is very unclear; but the urge to understand is something very fundamental in our humanity, and 'Particle Fever' conveys this well.

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