Physicists Debut In Documentary

Harvard film fans can check out the latest in "cinema verite" to hit Cambridge as People and Particles: A Documentary Film of a Physics Laboratory makes its local debut at Jefferson Labs this Monday.

Particles had its New York premiere at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Dec. 28.

The 28-minute movie was prepared from over 50,000 feet of documentary film taken of a team of Harvard scientists working in the Cambridge Electron Accelerator over the past two years. It was produced for Harvard Project Physics, an experimental physics course in its final test year in over 100 high schools and colleges.

The film's stars are the Harvard physicists, students, engineers and technicians--working under Karl Strauch, professor of Physics, and James K. Walker, assistant professor of Physics--who have been studying the influence of electrical charges on one another at exceedingly small distances. To do so, the scientists have used the beam from the accelerator to produce electron-positron pairs.

Particles was produced by Robert G. Gardner '48, director of the Film Study Center in the Peabody Museum, and Gerald Holton, professor of Physics. It will be shown at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, free to the film-loving public.