Gauranteed that you will learn something from Particle Fever

Whether you know anything about particle physics or not, still worth seeing the Levinson documentary Particle Fever, which follows over about 5 years the development of the CERN collidor in Switzerland and the eventual confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson particle, believed to the the particle that enables the other particles to come together and form atoms, molecules, and in fact the entire physical world of our universe. By following about 5 main characters - three physics theorists and two experimentalists, the ones who confirm the theories, or not - Levinson makes this arcane material very clear to the lay audience - lots of good graphics and illustrations, some quite witty, and a strong sense of each of the main narrators, who are obviously each great teachers and communicators and thoroughly engrossed in their subject. We get a sense of how vast the experiment is in a way that none of the news accounts quite captured, and of the stakes of the experiment: in confirming the existence of Higgs boson, the physicists also get information as to whether our universe is unique but surrounded by an infinite # of other universes or whether the rules of physics are consistent across the entire universe, and that the universe is one. We see how much is at stake on a personal level for each of these physicists, especially the older ones who may learn from the results that their life of theorizing has taken them down a dead end. As one boldly puts it: Moving from one great failure to another is form of success. Levinson deserves credit for even seeing that there was potentially great material here - it will remind you, to a degree, of movies and documentaries about the space program, with large teams of scientists gathered tensely waiting for outcomes; though the film breaks no new cinematic ground - and I wish he had foregone the annoying soundtrack and let the natural sounds speak for themselves - he made great choices in his main characters and conveyed really complex material in simple forms, terms, and images.