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A first-person view of physics history

10/15/24

Michael Riordan has spent decades ruminating on the history of physics, including events he participated in himself.

11/01/08

Street-corner physics

Leon Lederman, a 1988 Nobel laureate and Fermilab physicist, plopped a folding table and two chairs on a busy New York City street corner and sat under colorful hand-scrawled signs offering to answer physics questions.

11/01/08

Boosting a collider one comic at a time

Comiket—short for Comic Market—is the world's largest comic convention. Held in Tokyo, it draws more than half a million people from all over the world to buy and selldoujinshi—self-published manga and graphic novels.

11/01/08

BaBar and the very tiny particle

In which the 500 members of the BaBar experiment buy enough time for one last adventure: capturing the bottom-most bottomonium

11/01/08

A special recognition

On Sept. 10, scientists at the European laboratory CERN sent the first beam of protons around the Large Hadron Collider.

11/01/08

The dark universe debate

Who will be the first to prove the existence of dark matter and dark energy? A particle physicist and an astrophysicist go head to head.

11/01/08

Life's one eclipse after another

On the wall outside Cherrill Spencer's office, a scientific poster describes a prototype for a new type of accelerator magnet; a card thanks her for donating her long hair to make a wig for an ailing girl; and a scribbled note points to a spot on a map southeast of Novosibirsk, Russia.

11/01/08

Where old physics stuff goes to live

The Fermilab boneyard is no burial ground; its a place where unwanted parts find new homes and lives. Theyre matched with scientists who can put them to good use, donated to local schools and parks, or sold for recycling.

An illustration of a teapot letting off steam

11/01/08

Magnet quench

A quench occurs when a magnet in a particle accelerator loses its superconductivity.

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