Join physics enthusiasts worldwide in celebrating the tenth anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, which imparts mass to all the other particles. Knoxville’s celebrators can enjoy a screening of the documentary PARTICLE FEVER at Central Cinema on Wednesday, July 6, at 7 pm. Tickets are free but registration is required.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Department of Physics and Astronomy will host the event, which includes a panel discussion and Q&A after the screening with ORNL Physics Division Director Marcel Demarteau and UT Assistant Professors of Physics Larry Lee and Tova Holmes. UT Publications and Communications Coordinator Catherine Longmire will moderate the panel.
PARTICLE FEVER, directed by physicist-turned-filmmaker Mark Levinson, follows six scientists during the launch of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Approximately 10,000 scientists from more than 100 countries joined their pursuit, which used the LHC to recreate conditions that existed moments after the Big Bang. Experiments using LHC’s main general-purpose detectors, ATLAS and CMS, discovered the existence of a subatomic particle with the expected properties after a 40-year search. Theoretical physicists who had predicted the Higgs particle won a Nobel Prize for the discovery in 2013.
