I have been attending hundreds of talks by particle physicists who look for a very specific experimental signature that is predicted by a very specific theory extending the Standard Model.
Guest houses are common among particle physics labs, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is no exception. But in many ways, the Stanford Guest House, situated on the grounds of SLAC, is different.
A one-time visitor to SLAC, the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), recently took to the frigid skies over Antarctica on a mission looking for evidence of cosmic-ray neutrinos.
The sun is shining; the Earth is warm instead of icy. Life is good, thanks to the weak force. One of the four known forces that shape the universe, the weak force sustains our lives, driving the nuclear reactions that power the sun and heat the Earth’s core. It’s also tremendously useful.
The world, by some accounts, was created in seven days. Not to try and top that, but a university band managed to re-enact the big bang in a period of less than an hour.
As physicists and engineers devise ways to make the International Linear Collider perform better at a lower cost, the design evolves, sometimes with tweaks but at other times with major reconfigurations.