Particle Fever / The Quest

Saturday, February 21, 2015
Film Screening: 10:30 am – 12:30 pm
Q&A: 12:30 pm – 1:15 pm
(Intermission)
Roundtable: 2:30 pm – 4:30 pm

Past Event

Particle Fever, Mark Levinson’s award-winning 2013 documentary (for which Helix Center Executive Committee member Carla Solomon was a producer), tells the remarkable story of the monumental search for the Higgs boson, the elementary force particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

Following a morning presentation of the film in its entirety, our afternoon roundtable convenes distinguished individuals whose work engages them either directly in the thrill of scientific or other quests or in their study. In addition to curiosity and courage, what other qualities of mind and character may drive us in our quests to discover what we believe to exist, as well as to explore what is completely unknown?

 

Participants:

Sarah Demers

Horace D. Taft Associate Professor of Physics, Yale University

Professor Demers is a particle physicist who studies the fundamental particles and forces of nature. Her recent work has focused on the characterization of the Higgs Boson and a measurement of tau polarization with the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Demers received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and her PhD from the… read more »

Mark Levinson

Director of Particle Fever

Before embarking on his film career, Mark earned a doctoral degree in theoretical particle physics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the film world, he became a specialist in ADR, working with actors and directors in post-production to write and record additional dialogue. He has worked closely with such directors as Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The… read more »

Alberto Manguel

Writer and translator

Alberto Manguel is an Argentinian-Canadian writer, translator and critic. He has published both fiction and non-fiction, and received numerous international awards, among others the Formentor Prize 2017 and the Gutenberg Prize 2018. Until August 2018, he was the director of the Argentine National Library. He lives in New York.

Jean Strouse

Historian and Biographer

Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan, American Financier (1999, 2014) and Alice James, A Biography (1980, 2011), which won the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Vogue, and Slate. A member… read more »

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