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.
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.
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.
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.
For her latest work, choreographer Liz Lerman took members of her dance troupe to CERN, where they reveled in the fog, danced in the aisles and found inspiration in wide-ranging conversations with scientists.
Alberto sits down at a computer and brings up a clickable map of CERN. But rather than dry text, he is greeted with bright, musical animation, a pinball game, a quiz show, rocket ships, evil slugs, and music videos.
