If you missed the Department of Energy's Fermilab special one-time showing
of the documentary "The Atom Smashers", you can watch a shorter 53-minute
version which will air on PBS, Tuesday, Nov. 25.
The documentary chronicles life at the Batavia laboratory and an international research race in easy-to-understand terms.
The film chronicles what the producers call the David-and-Goliath-like race between Fermilab's Tevatron experiments and the Large Hadron Collider, the largest science experiment in the world, housed at the European particle physics laboratory CERN.
The laboratories are competing to make the next big discovery in our understanding of the universe and how matter forms.
The film follows the lives of eight Fermilab scientists over the course of 3 ½ years to learn about the experiments, how physicists balance home life and work and why the scientific world has gotten excited about this particular search.
The directors interview national media, a Nobel Prize winner and a federal policy expert about how the United States should balance science research and science funding with other economic issues.
The film was accepted at film and science festivals in Chicago, Canada, Paris and Norway.
Northwestern University lecturer Clayton Brown and Monica Ross, a Columbia College professor, produced the film.