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03/01/05

The growth of e-printing

Before the days of the World Wide Web, scientists would mail their colleagues preprints, hard copies of papers submitted to scientific journals. In 1991, particle physicists began posting these papers on the Web, calling them e-prints.

03/01/05

X-ray blaze on an invisible world

With laser-precise x-ray vision, the Linac Coherent Light Source will be an unprecedented tool to see how ultra-fast, ultra-small things work.

03/01/05

The doorkeepers of building 280

Unless you're looking for them, you might not notice the two stone gargoyles standing watch over building 280 at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In fact, for the first month they were in place, not many people did notice them.

03/01/05

What's in a name?

I have heard conflicting reports as to who decided to call one of the most spectacular intellectual innovations of human history "the Standard Model," physicists' best construct for explaining the range and behavior of elementary particles that make up the universe as we know it.

Illustration of dancers without partners
03/01/05

Supersymmetry

Supersymmetry is a proposed property of the universe.

Logbook of February 2005
02/01/05

Special relativity

Einstein had promised but later refused to publish this 1912 expository treatise, his earliest known manuscript on special relativity. No original manuscripts survive for the articles of Einstein’s 1905 annus mirabilis.

02/01/05

Night shift

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, a crew of four to five operators plus a crew chief are on shift in Fermilab's Main Control Room, monitoring the accelerator complex.

02/01/05

Beyond the Standard Model

At almost any particle physics conference, meeting, or lunch table, the phrase “"physics beyond the Standard Model" is heard over and over again. What’'s wrong with the Standard Model, anyway? Why are physicists so sure that there is something beyond it?

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