Watch the trailer.
The Atom Smashers chronicles two gripping races: a 40-year international scientific competition to find the world's most important subatomic particle and the effort of a massive machine built to find it. Buried beneath the Illinois prairie (and the buffalo grazing above it), one can find the Tevatron, a four-mile tunnel purely designed to conduct experiments on hydrogen particles: to smash them, crunch the numbers, and see what turns up. It's part of Fermilab, the 20th century's most powerful subatomic particle accelerator laboratory, where around the clock physicists race to find the elusive Higgs' boson, theorized to be the missing link that will explain existence.
In Bush's America, though, military spending, not science, is the priority. Though we live in an age where the windows for understanding the universe are wide open, Fermilab is under internal attack, another symptom of the decline of American power. Still, the all-too-human physicists of Fermilab radiate infectious enthusiasm, pushing the Tevatron to deliver all that it can before the 16-mile-long CERN, located in Switzerland, begins accelerating its first particle in 2008. If Fermilab does not make an important discovery before then, the Tevatron will surely be turned off forever. An exploration of the beautiful truths and frustrating difficulties of particle physics, Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross' captivating documentary watches its amiable characters work and live in and out of the laboratory, examining the intersection between science, politics and culture on an international scale.
Facebook
Digg
Twitter
Google Bookmarks
LiveJournal
Deli.icio.us
Reddit
Ma.gnolia
Stumble Upon
Yahoo! MyWeb
Furl
BlinkList
Technorati
Mixx
Windows Live
Print this Page
Email to a Friend