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.
Men and women wearing gaudy dresses, looking for customers under garish neon signs—this is a common sight in Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku, a famous entertainment and red-light district in Tokyo, Japan.
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.
An impromptu frog habitat vanished with final repairs to the roof of Fermilab's Meson Lab. Leaks—lots of leaks—have plagued the lab's 12 blue and orange concave arches since it opened 32 years ago.
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?
Laughter punctuates the excited conversations, a mix of German and English. Drinks are passed around and children dart among the legs of the hundred or so scientists gathered together for one last time. The sky’s blue is deepening: only 90 minutes until sunset.