Look at the periodic table of elements, and youd be hard pressed to find an element that is not used in physics. But what are the most important elements for building accelerators, detecting particles, and solving the mysteries of the universe?
The spotlight caught Todd Satogata. The camera zoomed in. “Did your particle beam shoot down a UFO?” the TV host asked. The accelerator physicist at RHIC, Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, smiled. Of course not.
You can't feel it. Yet the moon's gravitational pull shifts the ground ever so slightly, creating “earth tides” that rhythmically raise and lower the ground.
Plugged into a weatherproof outlet behind SLAC's Test Laboratory, what looks like an oversized green-and-silver go-cart waits with its load of tools and paint supplies.
When it comes to training, hiring, and retaining women and members of ethnic minorities, particle physics lags far behind other fields of science. Staffers at three national labs Fermilab, SLAC, and Brookhavenare attacking the problem at every level.
Who is the grandfather of particle physics? Some might argue he is Otto Mencke, a German philosopher and scientist who received his doctorate from Leipzig University in 1688.
Gazing into space, scientists wonder why the universe is expanding ever faster. What mysterious force is at work? By recording the light from hundreds of millions of galaxies from a mountaintop in Chile, they hope to find out what's going on.
