Synopsis

Imagine being able to watch as Edison turned on the first light bulb, or as Franklin received his first jolt of electricity…

For the first time, a film gives audiences a front row seat to a significant and inspiring scientific breakthrough as it happens. Particle Fever follows six brilliant scientists during the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, marking the start-up of the biggest and most expensive experiment in the history of the planet, pushing the edge of human innovation.

As they seek to unravel the mysteries of the universe, 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries joined forces 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. But our heroes confront an even bigger challenge: have we reached our limit in understanding why we exist?

Directed by Mark Levinson, a physicist turned filmmaker, from the inspiration and initiative of producer David Kaplan and masterfully edited by Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, The Godfather trilogy), Particle Fever is a celebration of discovery, revealing the very human stories behind this epic machine.

Filmmakers




Mark Levinson
Director

Before embarking on his film career, Mark earned a doctoral degree in particle physics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the film world, he became a specialist in the post-production writing and recording of dialogue known as ADR. He has worked closely with such directors as Anthony Minghella, Francis Coppola, Tom Tykwer, Milos Forman and David Fincher. He is the writer/producer/director of the narrative feature film Prisoner of Time, which examined the lives of former Russian dissident artists after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and had an acclaimed premiere at the Moscow International Film Festival.


David Kaplan
Producer

David Kaplan is a professor of theoretical particle physics at Johns Hopkins University and studies supersymmetry, dark matter, and properties of the Higgs boson. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle, David held research positions at the University of Chicago and Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Center. He has been awarded the Outstanding Junior Investigator prize from the Department of Energy and named an Alfred P. Sloan fellow. He has been a featured host and consultant on science programs for the History Channel and National Geographic.



Claudia Raschke-Robinson
Cinematographer

Award winning cinematographer Claudia Raschke-Robinson has photographed independent feature films and documentaries for over 15 years. Her most notable feature documentaries are Mad Hot Ballroom (Best Documentary, Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2005), Peabody Award winning Black Magic (2009, ESPN), The Music In Me (HBO series 2008), Oscar-nominated My Architect (add’l DP), Oscar-nominated Small Wonder (add’l DP), and Oscar nominated Sister Rose’s Passion (add’l DP).


Walter Murch
Editor

Universally acknowledged as a master in his field, he is revered for his work as a film editor and sound designer, a term that he coined. Murch has worked with, among others, director Francis Ford Coppola on such cinematic milestones as The Godfather I, II and III, and Apocalypse Now, for which he won his first Academy Award in 1979. He also worked on Anthony Minghella’s film The English Patient for which he won an unprecedented double Academy Award in 1996 for Best Film Editing and Best Sound. He has also been nominated for Oscars for The Conversation, Julia, The Godfather: Part III, Ghost, and Cold Mountain. Murch has written a beautiful book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye (2001).


Anthos Media
Producer

Anthos Media LLC is a new company dedicated to the production and distribution of documentary films aimed at the family audience.  Along withParticle Fever, the company has produced The New Public by Jyllian Gunther and two short documentaries – one about the oldest psychoanalytic institute in the United States and the other about first responders to the Haiti earthquake of 2009.  The company is currently working on Letters from Baghdad about the English diplomat Gertrude Bell and Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People, about the man behind the prize.

The company’s principals are Dr. Carla Solomon and Andrea Miller. Dr. Solomon, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, is a longstanding advocate for social change through volunteerism and philanthropy. Andrea Miller is an independent producer whose credits include the feature Dark Matter (Sloan Prize, Sundance; best narrative feature, Asian Film Festival), “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” (Emmy), “Shining Time Station,” and the original “Indecision ‘92” (Comedy Central’s longstanding election coverage).  She was formerly an executive at Sony Wonder and also at Turner Networks where she headed the start-up of Cartoon Network Japan.



Robert Miller
Composer

Composer Robert Miller has written several works that have been performed by orchestras nationwide. He has been the Composer-In-Residence with the New York-based Jupiter Symphony from 1996 – 1999. The New York Pops performed his orchestrations to Leonard Bernstein’s famed West Side Story Variations at Carnegie Hall. In addition to his symphonic efforts, Miller is considered among the top echelon of composers working in television and commercials. Some of his recent films include a feature documentary, Why We Fight (Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2005), Red Doors (Best NY Narrative, Tribeca 2005), and the critically acclaimed The Caller (2008).



MK12
Graphics and Animation

MK12 is a design and filmmaking collective with acclaim in both commercial and artistic arenas. Founded in 2000, MK12′s work constantly challenges the boundaries between narrative structure and experimental storytelling via juxtapositions of live action, graphic design, nostalgic influence and new technologies. MK12 has been sought after to direct numerous commercial & network-based projects and has been involved with several game promotions & cinematics, and has also created title sequences & in-film graphic FX for feature films such as Stranger than Fiction, The Kite Runner, Holy Wars and Quantum of Solace. Their self-produced short films have been featured in numerous international film festivals.

Physicists




Savas Dimopoulos
A Greek immigrant who now occupies an endowed chair at Stanford University, Savas has been on an odyssey for 30 years to find the true theory of nature. Many consider him the most likely to have a theory confirmed by the LHC, potentially winning the Nobel Prize. A mentor to many in the field, Savas has recently begun to feel the pangs of age, and worries if he’ll be an active participant in the next revolution.







Nima Arkani-Hamed
An intense, outspoken young theorist, Nima’s father was also a physicist, who spoke openly against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard after the revolution in 1979. In fear for their lives, the family fled into Turkey on horseback. Nima now treats physics with the same life and death imperative. Snatched up by Harvard with a full professorship before he was 30, Nima moved in 2008 to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. With many of his ideas poised to be tested at the LHC, Nima hopes to make the impact his colleagues think he is capable of. He bet several years salary that the elusive Higgs boson would finally reveal itself at the LHC.








Fabiola Gianotti
In 1982, Fabiola received a piano diploma at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan, Italy. In 1989, she received her Ph.D. in Particle Physics from the University of Milan. She has devoted the last 20 years to the development of the ATLAS detector, the largest detector at the LHC. She became the leader of the experiment just as the LHC began operation, supervising nearly 3,000 physicists and engineers around the world. Like her Italian ancestor, Columbus, Fabiola’s fervent dream for the LHC is to discover an entirely unexpected “new world.”








Monica Dunford
Awarded a prestigious Enrico Fermi Fellowship from the University of Chicago, Monica’s gung ho, adventurous spirit has led her not only to the frontiers of science, but to the boundaries of human endurance. Her “leisure” activities of marathoning, cycling, rowing and mountain climbing have provided useful conditioning for the 16-hour days she regularly spends working on the ATLAS detector. As a young American post-doc, she is excited to be at the center of the physics universe and anxious to make her mark during her stint in Geneva.







Martin Aleksa
Arriving from Austria over 12 years ago, Martin now has a coveted permanent position at CERN. He was one of the original designers of one of the central components of the ATLAS detector, the Liquid Argon Calorimeter. Elected to the position of ATLAS Run Control Coordinator in 2011, Martin was handed overall responsibility for the collection of data from the ATLAS detector just as the LHC began to produce its first new results.






Mike Lamont
Trained as a physicist in England, Mike migrated to the engineering side of the actual collider machine in Geneva. As Beam Operation Leader, he feels a personal responsibility to “deliver beams” of protons to the experiments. His dry wit has been a welcome relief in the adrenalin-charged, high-pressure environment of the CERN Control Center.