• Kaplan (right) at the Large Hadron Collider

The new documentary Particle Fever, which opens today at the Music Box, recounts the opening of the Large Hadron Collider in 2008 and the events leading up to the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson (a subatomic particle first theorized in the mid-60s). For a movie so concerned with the scientific process, it’s surprisingly lively and good-humored—as I note in my capsule review, it often feels like a sports movie, steadily building excitement as the physicists come closer to realizing their goal. The film originated with David Kaplan, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who worked at the LHC. As he explains, he began documenting his experience on the project for a personal record, but gradually realized that the material might be turned into a good movie. Mark Levinson, a longtime sound editor (and former physics student), was brought in as director, and with him came Walter Murch, the renowned editor and sound mixer best known for his work with Francis Ford Coppola. Particle Fever marks the first documentary Murch has worked on—according to Kaplan, he did it out of his lifelong love of physics. Kaplan will take part in a discussion after the 7:10 PM screening tomorrow. My conversation with him is below.

Well, I’ve been watching myself for years now, ever since [director Mark Levinson and I] decided to integrate clips of me in the film. But when I was in the editing room discussing the film [with Levinson and Walter Murch], I would think about myself as a character. Sometimes I’d even talk about myself in the third person, just to remind myself that it was about what audiences would see and experience.

Having little knowledge of particle physics, I responded most to the metaphysical conversations that you and the other scientists have throughout the film. Are these conversations commonplace in your field, or did they intensify around the LHC?

  • The Large Hadron Collider, as seen in Particle Fever

The biggest example is the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider [which is discussed in Particle Fever]. That’s a particle collider that was being built in Texas. It was going to be 54 miles around—a factor of three bigger than the LHC. Congress cancelled its construction in 1993, after they’d dug 14 miles of tunnel and spent roughly $2 billion. And a lot of scientists had relocated to Dallas. They were doing lots of research, preparing for that Collider, and all their work became irrelevant—and not for scientific reasons, but for political reasons.

  • Particle Fever

Walter created this atmosphere that paralleled the moment-by-moment experience. So, all that dramatic tension in the movie, while it didn’t happen exactly that way, reflects a rush of feelings that went through every physicist’s mind throughout this process. It was unbelievably cool watching him work.

Do you hope the movie will increase public awareness of what physicists do?