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Arts & Culture

Particle Fever

Calorimeter inside the ATLAS detector.
Courtesy of ATLAS Experiment © 2013 CERN
Calorimeter inside the ATLAS detector.

Airs Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2016 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV

Virtual Tour

Take a virtual tour of the Large Hadron Collider.

For the first time, a film gives audiences a front row seat to our generation’s most 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 to understand why we exist?

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Directed by Mark Levinson, a physicist turned filmmaker, and masterfully edited by Walter Murch ("Apocalypse Now," "The English Patient"), “Particle Fever” is a celebration of discovery, revealing the very human stories behind this epic machine.

Particle Fever Trailer