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.
Parked between a shiny green Camaro and a remodeled '63 Mustang, a 1929 Ford Model A pickup-turned-hot rod is a mosaic of rust and rot. A rag plugs the radiator, and ancient wooden slats border the truck bed.
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.
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.
