All you really need to know about Particle Fever is that it includes footage of physicists rapping. About physics. Wearing giant Einstein masks.
It’s that blend of earnestness and abandon that informs Mark Levinson’s utterly absorbing documentary, a chronicle of the launch of the Large Hadron Collider and the search for the fabled Higgs boson, a subatomic particle long theorized but never located. The film takes a skinny 99 minutes to cover a five-year span and a territory as huge as the universe — bigger, actually, once you learn that some theorists think ours might be just one of many. It’s jaw-droppingly cool stuff, explained with admirable clarity by an affable physicist tour-guide, David E. Kaplan, and wedded to the tale of a massive technological undertaking like nothing in history. (“The biggest machine ever built by human beings,” as one scientist puts it.) And it’s flat-out thrilling.
The Higgs boson, if you don’t remember the headlines, is the one some people (not physicists) call “the God particle,” and it’s the key to a sprawling construct called the Standard Model, which particle physics uses to explain … well, everything. Everything we know about how the universe works. Find the Higgs, confirm the Standard Model.
Well, sort of. Much — including the notion that there might be multiple universes, with many different flavors of physics — depends on the mass of the Higgs. That’s why thousands of people teamed up to find it, spending two decades building this massive supercollider to smash beams of protons together, essentially recreating the Big Bang so they can measure the Higgs. Talk about a quest with some stakes.