At a recent symposium honoring former Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Director Jonathan Dorfan, dinner guests were treated to a course of the unexpected.
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.
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.
As Reid Mumford pedals, sometimes he thinks about how to break away from the pack. Other times he thinks about how the smallest bits of the universe break apart in high-energy collisions.