Icarus Films will be
teaming with The KimStim Collection on Jan. 16 for the DVD debut of documentary
filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s CERN, a behind-the-scenes look at
the Large Hadron Collider on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.
It is difficult to imagine
a machine, a “particle collider” composed of superconducting magnets, which
operates at 520.3 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero, and is 16.78 miles in
circumference.
It took ten years to
build (after 14 years of planning), the involvement of over 100 countries and a
team of scientists and engineers that totaled over 10,000 to complete the
project … and it still wasn’t done.
They shut it down for two years and upgraded it, finishing the work in
2015.
Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Our
Daily Bread, Homo Sapiens, etc.) gives us insight
into the workings of the massive structure through interviews with a number of
the the researchers/ physicists and a tour of the facility. The purpose of the Large Hadron Collider
(simply “CERN,” hence the title of the documentary) is to take two “high-energy
particle beams” and fire them at each other, using an array of massive “dipole”
and “quadrupole” magnets to focus the beams, which slam into each other in a
recreation of the “Big Bang.”
Of note, the arrival of Geyrhalter’s
CERN
on DVD occurs just three months after the facility fired Xenon atoms for the
first time (Xenon is a “noble gas,” which according to researchers at CERN
closely replicates heavy-ion collisions) … normally they fire lead atoms at
each other, so this event (Oct. 16) was considered a major milestone in the
history of the facility.
CERN is a fascinating look at the world of theoretical
science — even for the uninitiated into such things — and sheer size and scope
of the project.
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