Neutrino masses are extremely difficult to measure. While we know precisely how much an electron weighs, we have little information on the mass of its neutral partner, the electron neutrino. The same is true of the muon neutrino and tau neutrino.
At a recent symposium honoring former Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Director Jonathan Dorfan, dinner guests were treated to a course of the unexpected.
In May 1983, physicists on the UA1 detector for the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator at CERN made the first definitive observations of the Z boson.
Some days Jerry Zimmerman calmly follows his typical morning routine and joins countless other suburbanites on the road to work. Then there are the other days. Those days Zimmerman takes on an alter-persona.