But getting to know the people behind the science allows us to admire them for their perseverance and connect with them as humans. Kaplan's mentor at Stanford University, the brilliant Savas Dimopoulos, recalls fleeing his childhood home of Turkey with his Greek family because of ethnic tensions. Fabiola Gianotti, the head of one of the main teams seeking the Higgs, is also an accomplished pianist.
And as all these researchers inch closer to the discovery they hope to make, they find themselves falling into one of two categories, with mind-boggling notions about whether our universe has tidy, parallel others out there, or whether ours is merely a speck or a pocket of a multiverse where chaos reigns. If the latter is true, as Kaplan posits, "In a sense, it's the end of physics."
Heady stuff, indeed. But "Particle Fever" also works on a purely visual, visceral level. It's shot beautifully, with crisp, vibrant footage of not just the collider itself—which resembles a buzzing, whirring, seven-story stained glass window—but also of the striking landscape surrounding the lab. The snow-covered French Alps against a baby-blue sky are especially spectacular. The film also movies with a great fluidity, the work of veteran editor (and frequent Francis Ford Coppola collaborator) Walter Murch, a two-time Academy Award winner for "Apocalypse Now" and "The English Patient."
If you follow the news, you know how this multibillion-dollar adventure ends. But that doesn't detract from the power of that moment, or the infinite, dizzying possibilities that await.
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