As passengers boarded the train in a Berlin suburb, researchers from the Large Hadron Collider greeted them: Imagine you are a proton and this train is the LHC tunnel. You will travel 37 km, slightly more than the 27 km it takes the protons to circle the LHC tunnel.
Blackboards filled with mathematical equations and scientific machines as large as cathedrals can awe, and sometimes overwhelm. But Koosh balls are another matter.
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.
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.
Donald Glaser of the University of California, Berkeley, won a Nobel Prize for inventing the bubble chamber in 1952 as a way of detecting subatomic particles. Now a University of Chicago professor, Juan Collar, is leading the charge to make the bubble chamber cool and cutting-edge again.