Movie Review: Particle Fever

4 stars out of 5

In high school, I dropped A.P. Physics. (Sorry, Mr. Swesey.) I respect science, I appreciate it, but ultimately, it’s not my bag, baby. So in 2012, when news broke about Higgs boson—the God Particle—I had no idea what they were talking about. I think some friends on Facebook were excited about it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to actually read the entire articles. Something science-y had been found, something important. OK, great, now let’s see what Marmaduke is up to.

Two years later, I likely would’ve skipped this documentary as well, except my friend Liz suggested seeing it, and she has very good taste. And the capsule description said it was easy to understand, fun—even sexy.

Well, I don’t know about sexy, but this is pretty cool stuff nonetheless. The search for the missing puzzle piece in the building blocks of… everything. Recreating conditions just after the Big Bang.

We learn that physics is split into theorists and expermimentalists: those who come up with the ideas and those who test them. And to test this Higgs concept, they only had to spend 20 years building the WORLD’S BIGGEST MACHINE, the Large Hadron Collider. And they’d send one particle whipping around a 17-mile circle at ungodly speeds, another particle going the other way, they’d smash into each other, and maybe, maybe, maybe, in the collision we’d find the Holy Grail of physics—the Higgs boson.

If we didn’t find it, oh, no big deal, just every theory we’ve ever had would be wrong.

In the process, we meet a handful of the 3,000 international scientists who worked on this project. There’s the menschy Jewish guy (a young Eugene Levy could’ve played him) and his cool Iranian buddy. There’s the hip-but-nerdy-type-A woman who all the über-geeks must lust after. We see their dedication and their passion, and their human sides. (I would’ve liked to see even more of their personal lives.) And there’s a nice dramatic arc: the early excitement, the big trouble that nearly shuts things down, and the triumphant return.

Just as a movie, I think I’d give this 3.5 stars—it’s a bit unclear why certain individuals were featured, and things do get a bit wonky; I occasionally had to struggle to keep my eyes open. But the utter awesomeness of the ideas at play here push this film to another level.

The Hadron Collider is being souped up to delve even deeper into their findings, and there’s a pretty heavy cliffhanger: Is there just one universe… or a whole buttload of them? I guess I’ll stay tuned for the sequel.