The location and the object for the 200 franc note are not hard to identify as representing CERN and the transformation of energy and matter in the LHC.
The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine. It doesn’t even involve subatomic particles—unless you count the electrons that flow through electronic circuits, carrying bits of information from one human brain to the next.
Physicist Brian Cox has been watching science fiction movies since he was a small child. He always scoffed at the imprecise nature of the science in movies. But over the past year, he learned a lot about the balance between making a movie entertaining and making it scientifically correct.
On October 19, 1991, at 6:50 p.m., Bjørn Wiik logged the first collisions in the new electron-proton particle collider at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg.
On June 29, 2007, when Albrecht Wagner told an assembly of nearly 1800 people to go to lunch and return at 2 p.m. for a surprise, nobody could have expected what was coming.
Search for “BaBar” on YouTube.com, and you'll get a long list of links to a 1980s TV series based on an animated elephant. But a surprise is hidden among the cartoons—a six-minute film shot in the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's BaBar control room.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois has a challenge: how will it maintain its central role as a place where particle accelerators produce groundbreaking discoveries in physics?