Explain it in 60 Seconds: Lattice QCD

John Zaklikowski: From junked part to detector art

Over the years, John Zaklikowski raided his savings account to purchase every mother board, cell phone and floppy disk in sight. Now he’s used them to create artwork modeled on large-scale particle physics experiments.

Sharing pizza across the Pacific

Monitoring a particle detector on the midnight shift can have a limited upside: the food.

Nobel meeting

Toward the end of June 1962, a virtual pantheon of modern physics descended on a tiny island just off the shores of Lake Constance, in Germany’s rolling Bavarian countryside.

Neutrino

Fiction: Catalyst

You've got to understand that all this happened a long time ago, and I reckon that with the monitoring we have in place now we'd have picked up on the event much sooner. But even if it recurred today, would we have any idea what was causing it?

Holy beam line! The red phone is ringing

When a villain threatened Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon picked up a bright red phone to call Batman. During the Cold War, a Moscow-to-Washington "red phone" served as a hotline to prevent nuclear attacks. Now SLAC has its own red phone.

John Gilbey tweaks the future

John Gilbey is a writer, photographer, educator, and project manager at Aberystwyth University in Wales. For the past two decades, his fiction and non-fiction stories have appeared in the likes of Nature, New Scientist, and the Guardian.

High schoolers catch some (cosmic) rays

Ben Nachman and several friends climbed out on the roof of Westside High School in Omaha, Nebraska, hauling a tangle of wires and what resembled a car-top luggage carrier. The high school juniors weren't pulling some elaborate prank.