Featuring a presentation by Dr. Philip Chang, Assistant Professor at the UF Department of Physics, on his work with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider!

Imagine being able to watch as Edison turned on the first light bulb, or as Franklin received his first jolt of electricity.

For the first time, a film gives audiences a front row seat to a 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 recreateconditions 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 in understanding why we exist?

Directed by Mark Levinson, a physicist turned filmmaker, from the inspiration and initiative of producer David Kaplan and masterfully edited by Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, The Godfather trilogy), Particle Fever is a celebration of discovery, revealing the very human stories behind this epic machine.

Dr. Philip Chang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics at University of Florida.  After receiving his PhD at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, he started his postdoctoral fellow position at UC San Diego as a member of Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) team at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN in Geneva.  In the past, Chang had also been a member of ATLAS Collaboration at the CERN LHC. Chang’s primary focus is on the investigation of the electroweak and the Higgs sector of the Standard Model (SM) through studying production of multiple massive particles. Chang has also been developing a novel charged-particle track finding algorithm to address the challenges of exponentially increasing computing resource usage at the LHC, leveraging industry advancements in heterogeneous computing and artificial intelligence techniques.