The 2018 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded Tuesday to Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their pioneering work to turn lasers into powerful tools.
Amateur scientists make important contributions in a number of fields, from astronomy to ornithology. But very few have the background needed to succeed in high-energy physics.
In August 1982, Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of the United Kingdom, paid a private visit to the European laboratory CERN. On her arrival she told Director General Herwig Schopper that she wanted to be treated as a fellow scientist.
When Sal Rappoccio, a postdoctoral researcher from Johns Hopkins University, joined the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment in mid-2007, he did what any newcomer would do. He tried to start his analysis. It did not go well.
Forty members of the Society for Sedimentary Geology drove down Loop Road, passed through the Sector 30 gate, and arrived on the north side of the klystron gallery.
Seeing is easy. We open our eyes, and there the world is–in starlight or sunlight, still or in motion, as far as the Pleiades or as close as the tips of our noses.
They had braved Parisian catacombs, gloomy dungeons, and shipwrecks. Yet as the elevator dropped 360 feet into a cavernous hall at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, uncertainty flickered across the faces of the globe-trotting television crew.