Higgs, Into the Heart of Imagination

The Higgs particle is named after British physicist Peter Higgs, who postulated it, and it is generally viewed as the missing link in particle physics. The Higgs particle is also known, not uncontroversially, as "The God Particle": many scientists assume that it exists, even though it has never been observed. Since Higgs published his hypothesis in 1964, an ever-expanding army of physicists has been trying to develop a method of making the assumed particle visible. To make this possible, a powerful underground particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been constructed in the CERN laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border. Thousands of scientists from all over the world looked on with bated breath at the launch of the LHC on September 10, 2008. In this documentary, Dutch professor Stan Bentvelsen and an international assembly of scientists discuss how fascinating and crucial the Higgs particle is, and how much it appeals to the scientific imagination. Their testimony, in combination with the footage of CERN, results in a film that is not concerned just with this one elusive particle -- a needle in a million haystacks -- but above all with the fundamental scientific drive to learn something new. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)