137 Film’s “The Atom Smashers” is the opening night film of Sept. 19-20 Science Chicago, “the world’s largest science festival,” at the Museum of Science and Industry.
The doc couldn’t be any more timely, in the wake of the global sensation stirred by the activation of the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland last week.
“It’s fascinating how much traction [the CERN accelerator] has gotten in the media,” co-director Clayton Brown said. “Now our movie comes along and says ?here’s the back story of everything that’s led up to this point.'”
In “The Atoms Smashers,” local physicists’ race to unlock the mysteries of the universe at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Fermilab scientists chase the elusive Higgs boson particle, as they face dwindling federal funds and CERN’s accelerator threatens to render Fermilab’s own Tevatron obsolete.
“We raise some questions in the film about what it means if the U.S. isn’t participating in this, if all our accelerators will be shut down by 2010 and most of our physicists will be going overseas,” Brown said.
Co-director Monica Long Ross added, “We’re excited about getting together with the museum. “It’s a way to give back to the science community, which has been so warm and welcoming to us.”
Brown, who teaches film at Northwestern, and Ross, who’s on leave from her teaching job at Columbia College, founded the nonprofit 137 Films with producer Andrew Suprenant, to tell humanistic stories about science and scientists.
Brown and Suprenant made the IFP/Chicago 2006 Production Fund-winning short “Galileo’s Grave,” a romance grounded in space research.
“Clayton brought science to the table,” said Long Ross. “My connection came from seeing how scientists are so much like artists. They have these projects that they’re obsessed with, and they have to struggle to convince granting agencies and the general public that what they’re doing is worthwhile.”
