Particle Fever
The Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva switches on, and this film follows the physicists waiting to see what it finds. Theorist David Kaplan and experimentalist Monica Dunford anchor the story from opposite sides of the same question, one betting on supersymmetry, the other just wanting the machine to work after a magnet failure shuts it down for over a year. Savas Dimopoulos and Nima Arkani-Hamed frame the stakes in plain terms: if the Higgs boson turns up light, it favors an elegant, structured universe; if it turns up in a certain other range, it points toward a messier multiverse where physics has no deeper explanation for its own constants. Fabiola Gianotti manages the ATLAS detector team through years of data collection building toward a single announcement. The film intercuts control-room tension and chalkboard arguments with plain explanations of what a Higgs discovery would actually mean, ending at the 2012 announcement that confirmed the particle and left the bigger argument about the universe's structure unresolved.