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"  The Large Hadron Collider demonstrates its power in many forms. It&amp;#039;s huge 17-mile circumference, buried under the Franco-Swiss border, has the power to inspire awe. The scientific colossus has the power recreate the conditions of the Big Bang by hurling particles at each other at close to the speed of light. And in 2012, LHC had the power to become either a saving grace or a death knell for modern physics. The discovery of the Higgs that summer might have relieved some tension, but it is only part of a drama that spans decades and crosses continents. Particle Fever is a new documentary film debuting in theaters in New York today and across the country in the coming weeks. The film focuses not on the machine but rather the people behind it\u2014the tireless experimentalists working in control rooms throughout CERN and the influential theorists whose ideas strive to explain unanswered questions about the universe. How to Explain the Universe in 99 minutes  We met producer David Kaplan and director Mark Levinson near the back of a corner coffee house in Columbia, Mo. Their film, Particle Fever, was selected to screen as part of the True/False Film Fest, a four-day long celebration of documentaries. Crowds met Kaplan and Levinson with thunderous applause after their first screening on the opening night of the festival. It&amp;#039;s now day three, and the duo still discuss the doc with unrelenting fervor. &amp;quot;I could not care less about teaching the audience physics,&amp;quot; says Kaplan, who&amp;#039;s also a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University. &amp;quot;The film started with the concept that we wanted the viewer to experience being a physicist.&amp;quot;      Particle Fever is a film almost seven years in the making. Kaplan met with Levinson in the fall of 2007, a year before the first beam at CERN. At the time, Kaplan was already trying to capture one of the most important moments in physics history in a short 8-minute film. &amp;quot;It was a story that I was already telling to everybody and not for the sake of making a movie, but because it was an amazing time for us,&amp;quot; Kaplan says. &amp;quot;Do you know any other time in history where an entire field hinged on one thing, and that one thing could have a very dramatic impact on everybody\u2014the entire way of thinking?&amp;quot; The film&amp;#039;s small budget and skeleton crew wasn&amp;#039;t enough. Kaplan wanted to do more and soon found an ally in Levinson, who also received a doctoral degree in particle physics before turning to film. Particle Fever would be his first documentary film as a director. &amp;quot;I was not at all interested in doing documentaries,&amp;quot; Levinson says. &amp;quot;I found out later that documentarians usually call the characters &amp;#039;subjects.&amp;#039; We didn&amp;#039;t call them subjects, they were characters. We talked about their dramatic development, their story, their dramatic arcs. That&amp;#039;s the way we started.&amp;quot; Canaries in a Coal Mine  The characters of Particle Fever come from two disparate camps: theoretical and experimental physicists. The differences between these two camps isn&amp;#039;t just a small fissure\u2014they are inherently at odds, Levinson says.  The film splits time with the experimentalists at CERN and a collection of theorists from different U.S. universities, such as Princeton and Stanford. &amp;quot;[These theorists] were not working on the known theory, the standard model, and they weren&amp;#039;t working so abstractly that the experiment had no relevance to them\u2014they had the new theories, which were going to be immediately impacted by what the LHC said,&amp;quot; Kaplan says. &amp;quot;In a sense, they were the canaries in the coal mine.&amp;quot; These physicists had the most to lose. If the LHC didn&amp;#039;t discover the Higgs or attributed the new particle with unanticipated properties, it could invalidate whole careers and decades of work.  Fabiolia Gianotti and Monica Dunford at work at CERN. Photos courtesy of PF Productions. At CERN, Levinson followed Fabiola Gianotti, leader of the ATLAS experiment, as well as Monica Dunford, an adventurous American post-doc eager to participate in the LHC experiments. From elation at LHC&amp;#039;s First Beam in 2008 to its crushing failure ten days later, Particle Fever gives a first-look at the teary-eyed joys, frustrated reactions, and endless hand-wringing reminiscent of NASA&amp;#039;s own high-tension mission control. The two schools of thought slowly merge toward the film&amp;#039;s conclusion. During the well-known Independence Day announcement, Peter Higgs received a standing ovation within the halls of CERN as Atlas and CMS separately announced that they had found the elusive particle. &amp;quot;When Higgs appears at the end, that&amp;#039;s a theorist coming to watch an experimental result,&amp;quot; Kaplan says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a metaphor for what was happening in the field.&amp;quot;      Solving for X To shoot the film, Levinson and Kaplan used a small crew with only one camera. To be many places at once, Levinson divvied out small cameras to his main characters, telling them to shoot monologues whenever they saw fit. &amp;quot;By the end we were logging the videos I had made, and we crossed 300 well before the end of production,&amp;quot; Kaplan says. &amp;quot;We decided to stop counting.&amp;quot; That helped him be in the right place at the right time. Levinson had subjects in Europe and America and also needed to split time among the many control rooms and command centers. Levinson remembers a few times when luck seemed on his side, when one character would showed up unexpectedly into another control room, allowing him to get double the footage. He simply describes these serendipitous moments as CERN-Dipity.  The film has been well-received during the festival circuit, but Kaplan and Levinson always aimed to impact a theatrical audience. In the coming weeks, they&amp;#039;ll know if they were a success. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve been doing festivals for nine months and even here I still thought &amp;#039;are people really going to get it?&amp;quot; Kaplan says.  Levinson understands the feeling, adding &amp;quot;or if people are going to even show up?&amp;quot; But despite needless worry, the duo feels they accomplished what they set out to do\u2014capture the people behind one of the biggest historical moments in science.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s wonderful,&amp;quot; Kaplan says. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re looking at something that&amp;#039;s coming from a very pure place. What is their motivation for doing it? What is our motivation? We want to discover something. We want to understand something.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a10130/cern-dipity-the-story-of-particle-fever-16559797/>