‘Particle Fever’ screening and discussion on Aug. 26 to feature film's star scientist

“Particle Fever,” the new, award-winning documentary that follows six scientists during the launch of the Large Hadron Collider—the biggest and most expensive experiment in the history of the planet—will be shown at the University of Chicago’s Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 26. One of the scientists who stars in the film, Nima Arkani-Hamed, as well as physicists from UChicago and Fermilab, will participate in a discussion following the screening.

“This is really my generation’s only shot … whatever we learn is going to have a dramatic impact on the way human beings think about the universe forever,” said  Arkani-Hamed, professor at the School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study. The film documents the inside story of 10,000 scientists from more than 100 countries who have joined in pursuit of a single goal: to recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang and find the Higgs boson, potentially explaining the origin of all matter.

Rocky Kolb, the dean of the Physical Sciences Division, will moderate a post-film discussion, which also will include Marcela Carena, UChicago physics professor and senior theoretical physicist at Fermilab, and Joe Lykken, director and chief research officer at Fermilab.

Together with their international colleagues, UChicago and Fermilab physicists are deeply involved in many aspects of one of the LHC’s two primary Higgs-related experiments, called ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid). Every experiment is a massive collection of instruments, each built at a different point along the 16.8-mile loop, which comprises the LHC.

The “Particle Fever” program is in conjunction with Cosmo 14, the 18th annual International Conference on Particle Physics and Cosmology, which is being hosted by the University’s Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics in Chicago from Aug. 25-29.

The screening and discussion will take place at 6:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. RSVP here.