SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Borgarkeri A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

rohit_kaa Modern particle physics can be expressed succinctly in a single piece of paper, but it would take years for the uninitiated to decipher it. This documentary brings one no closer to the inscrutable utterances of that page nor does it try to. What it aims at doing and what it succeeds in is depicting the emotion that drives the people to take on unthinkable tasks and work on it indomitably for decades on end to see some semblance of a result. It brings you closer to the heart of a scientist or an artist and try's to show the fundamental driving force of human endeavor. This is a beautiful piece of film making, and I heavily recommend you, whoever you are, whatever time you are in, wherever you be to watch this , because its worth it .

niutta-enrico I often noticed (with my great surprise) that my kids seemed pleased every time I started talking about Standard Model and M-theory. Other people too, from different backgrounds and in different occasions, seemed to enjoy a trip (sometimes even a long one) through particles and dimensions: Physics, in other words, is not so boring, at least as long as you don't have to really study it. The present documentary is very well-made (Director Mark Levison earned his PhD in Physics at Berkeley in 1983) and I enjoyed every frame of it. I found it even moving towards the end: who could possibly not cry when the mass of Higgs Boson is revealed? Throwing off the mask I will state what I really feel: QCD rules.

eyal philippsborn 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

bluefire-6 I generally evaluate films on their technical direction and production values, not necessarily their deep meanings -- because as a student of film and a video producer, I know how subjective those "deep-meaning" criteria can be. I found this film to be an exciting, well-crafted, exceptionally well-edited and sound- designed production. No one in the audience seemed ready to drop off as is so often the case with documentary features. Instead, the director's timing was precise and the arc of the story very well formed. But there was much more happening in this movie below the surface.The Hadron Collider is as one figure in the film indicated, the largest machine ever constructed by human beings ("machine" being meant as a mechanical unit, not a network like the Internet -- although even the Internet was essential to the successful use of the Collider, to distribute all of the data generated to various locations where it could be processed and analyzed). The drama of its conception was left a little vague, but from the time that construction began to the time it was used to look for the Higgs Boson, the characters involved are well portrayed and their motives thoroughly probed -- in an amazingly short time! The physics behind the quest for the "God Particle" are not all that hard to understand and besides, the film does a great job of simplifying even further so that anyone with a basic high school education should be able to follow the story and its implications.I particularly enjoyed the "main" characters, some of the key thinkers whose speculations as physics "theorists" fired the imagination of physics "experimentalists" who are driven to test the others' speculations. The give and take between the two communities gave the film its energy and tension. I hope there will be sequels following down the next round of experiments, to take place in Sweden, where an even bigger collider is being built -- and also the physicists, how their lives are turning based on the results gotten from this unique, massive exploration of the fundaments of existence itself.PS PARTICLE FEVER is not all youthful, bubbly energy and joyful discovery. The stories of the older physicists, facing their retirement from the field possibly without ever finding elusive answers to questions they posed decades earlier in their lives, was real hankie material -- and for good reason. In the field of particle physics, like other achievement-driven/self-promotional professions, it's not how smart you are but when you're smart, if luck is on your side and you timely get noticed, validated, and lauded. Miss the mark, and you may be relegated to obsolescence even if your mind is still active and your ideas large. Fortunately in this case, most of those with long-ago aspirations have lived long enough to have their ideas tested and thus learn their truth.Interesting how personal meaning and the meaning of the universe -- or multiverse, according to one theory tested by the Collider -- are so intertwined. And which really is the more important, a question about which there is no easy answer.See this film, you will emerge glad for the experience, with big questions yet to be answered.