Tom Peterson loves hunting season. He spends his lunch hours scouting the best spots, and weekends lurking around the edges of Fermilab's ponds and moving as silently as he can through old fields.
Imagine a house-sized acrylic fishbowl inside a giant, shiny, disco-ball-like sphere, suspended in a cavern as tall as a 10-story building. Now imagine climbing around inside that pitch-dark fishbowl with a squeegee and a flashlight.
Fermilab is cooking up a hot technology—and the serving is ultracold. The laboratory is stepping up efforts to develop and test superconducting radio-frequency cavities, a key technology for the next generation of particle accelerators and the future of particle physics.
When I assumed the position of director of the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU), my smart-mouthed friends joked that I became the Director of the Universe.
The eyes of the world were on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on September 10, 2008. On that day, dubbed "Big Bang Day" by the BBC, the first beams of subatomic particles zoomed around the 17-mile-long, super-cooled particle accelerator.