dallasryan Particle Fever is an interesting watch in showing what we believe we can prove, what we have proven (or believe we have), what will be disproven (and/or what we believe will be disproven) and everything else in between. Particle Fever proves there is never a solid answer to any of it, and even when the scientists believe they have found the 'God' Particle other scientists will argue that they didn't (outside of the documentary). The real question is not 'What can be proven?', but the real question is 'Can you disprove it?' A documentary worth watching for the debate and concepts

tchrist-71789 We are led along in this cinema to believe that the effort and money spent would provide a glimpse into how the universe was created. All the back stories and personal struggles were implying that there would be a "discovery" which would lead to a conclusion. Unfortunately I am a cynic. I see that a group of well paid, mostly tenured university scientists chosen to help with a project that could serve mankind as well as serve the interests of the individuals in terms of elevating themselves to the highest realms of their chosen fields-- ends predictably in a compromise. The only way to keep these folks traveling to an exotic and thrilling location every year- Geneva- so that they could cohabit with like-nerds (friends,cohorts) to themselves, despite the fact that outcome 140 would mean they were wasting massive amounts of time and money - public funds- no less- is trite. It's more than trite, if a discovery isn't made soon- it will go down in history as the biggest joke of all time- a joke made by the pseudo-intelligensia and foisted on the tax payers of the respective countries who contributed these funds. By example, it will be tantamount to a group of fishermen charged with catching a saltwater species in a freshwater lake. Even if they caught one it doesn't prove anything! Nerds are easily defined as any group of people who chose to segregate themselves socially by adhering to a set of activities which a majority of people find not only boring, but find those people to be social misfits. If these CERN folks cant find a theory to hang this research upon soon which will add to the progress of real and practical science, they will all be branded as something worse than nerds: pseudo-nerds!

grtendick Don't watch if you want to learn anything. About 5 minutes of the film is spent on hard science, the remainder is spent on a mediocre feel-good documentary. Read the Wiki page instead. Apparently my review needs more lines to be accepted. Don't read any further. I'm just writing text to fill in IMDb quota. I've said all I want to say about the film. This is getting tedious. Am I done yet? Nope, I need to keep typing. If you've read this far, you're wasting your time. Maybe I'm done now... Nope. I'm going to keep typing. I still don't have enough lines of text. IMDb, if you're reading this, this quota is ridiculous. Still not enough... I don't have 10 lines worth of stuff to say about this film!! Why make me write 10 lines of worthless garbage when all I had to say was worth three! You're wasting my time and the review readers. This is why I use the spoiled vegetable website to get legitimate reviews instead.

Miles-10 I am a layman and like to think of myself as an intelligent one. So, as I predicted in my headline, I like this movie, even though I have reservations. "Particle Fever" is about a labor intensive physics experiment--that involved many thousands of scientists, lasted from 2007 to 2012 and is actually still on-going. The fact that I watched this film in a format where I could stop and replay gave me an advantage over theater-goers whose reviews say that they could not follow much of the science. I got some things by listening to them twice whereas I might not have otherwise.I like the people aspect of the movie. Monica Dunford is just the cutest, tomboyish experimental (hands-on) physicist. Aside from having the most fabulous name, Fabiola Gianotti is proof that C.P. Snow was exaggerating when he said art is art and science is science and the twain shan't meet. Wrong. As well as being a top physicist, Fabiola was a classical musician and a passionate student of classic literature before she decided to go into science. Savas Dimopoulos is a font of wisdom whether acknowledging that theoretical physics is as much art as it is science or contrasting the act of making a cup of gourmet coffee (if it doesn't come out right you can try again in a few minutes) with physics (if your theory doesn't work out, then you've wasted thirty or forty years of your life).I don't remember who was who, but I enjoyed the humor of several of the scientists, especially the physicist who explained to an audience that there are two answers to the question of why they are conducting this experiment, the one they tell people and real one--not so much because their trying to hide something as they don't think the real reason would make much sense to most people.Then there is the very human moment when the "final" results are being released to a huge audience, and the man for whom the particle is named, Peter Higgs, is brought in and seated, but Monica Dunford points out that he has been given a less choice seat than her colleague's research assistant. At least he is inside. Dimopoulos is left out in the hallway, unable to get a seat at all even though he is a well-known physicist who has spent three decades writing about the Higgs particle.Despite not being a scientist, I have actually been to CERN, more than 25 years ago. It was pleasing to me to see the facilities and surrounding countryside.Although I learned some things about the science from this film, I am afraid I learned enough to understand why some nay-saying physicists do not think CERN's claim to have discovered the Higgs boson is correct and that the particle has not been found. The mass of the found particle surprised the scientists because it was around 125 or 126 GeV instead of the expected 115 or 140, the extremes hoped for by each of two competing theories. A number almost half way in between seems neither to confirm nor disprove either theory. Tienzien Gong has claimed that the reason for this is that they discovered not the Higgs boson but the "vacuum" boson, which an earlier physicist had predicted would have a mass of 125.4 GeV. So Gong thinks CERN's claim of success and the Nobel Prize awarded to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs are premature. But I throw cold water on an otherwise entertaining and informative movie.