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.
Luis Alvarez, a physicist at what today is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, attended a 1953 meeting of the American Physical Society and heard a young University of Michigan physicist named Donald Glaser describe a particle detector he’d developed and called a “bubble chambe
Advances in virtual control technology have shown scientists just how important humans are after all. Although scientists can now essentially operate a particle collider from anywhere in the world, having members of a team work well remotely is just as significant a challenge.
Call it subtle irony: The ground breaking for SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) took place among earth movers that had already been busily transforming the rolling California landscape for weeks.
Three-year-old Madeleine Rogers stands inside the spooky remains of a 275-pound pumpkin grown by her father, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center engineer Reggie Rogers.