Particle fever

Trailer

This is another  mind-expanding documentary which I got to watch (thanks, Netflix!). It is about the Large Hadron collider (a particle accelerator designed to smash sub-atomic particles together, to understand the building blocks of everything), and the people behind it. What is everyone looking for? The Higgs- Boson, or the "God particle" (manifestation of a Higgs-field, which gives mass to everything known to us).

1,00,000 people from more than 100 countries have been involved in this experiment, which was designed beginning in the mid-80's. Billions of Euros have been poured into this experiment. Why, the layman asks. Why so much money and effort on a stupid experiment (whose outcome we don't know)? Because, the physicists explain, because the quest for knowledge is what makes us human. True story.

What is the experiment?

We meet many people who have devoted decades to formulating different theories, seeking out the pure truth. That was a true pleasure. The theorists are those who come up with new theories relating to the laws of the universe, and the experimentalists are those who work on designing experiments which will approve/ disapprove the theorists :) It is fun to watch fully-grown people gleam in excitement like kids at a birthday party, when it is time to launch the colliders for the first time.

We are given tantalizing glimpses of what supersymmetry (theory which predicts opposite particles for every particle in the standard model) and multiverse  are. The part about cosmological constant ( I knew what this was) and the multiverse theory just blew my mind!

This movie added some flesh and blood to the fledgling knowledge of all the things I mentioned earlier. Things are much more clear now!

The man who began it all - Peter Higgs

If you're someone who wonders about things like(jobless), "how big is the universe", "what happened before the beginning of time", "why, and how are we here", you should definitely watch this. Even otherwise, if you have a general curiosity of things around you, I feel you should still watch this, as you will learn a lot from this movie :)

The conclusion

Facts about the LHC.

*I do not own any of these images. All pictures courtesy their respective owners*