In the early 1950s, Nobel-Laureates-to-be Norman Ramsey and Ed Purcell created cards of physical constants they found themselves using most frequently.
When researchers at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center realized their distance from Antarctica was a scientific inconvenience, they set about crafting an icy world of their own in Menlo Park, California.
When exploring the mysteries of the universe, don't neglect the floorboards. Last December at Fermilab, repairs to the ceiling over the kitchen in the Aspen East users' center, targeting a joist that had distorted the floor of the dorm room above, produced some startling debris.
As a mechanical designer, Catherine Carr's first big undertaking at SLAC was a vacuum transporter system that let operators install electron cathodes, under vacuum, into the injector gun of the Stanford Linear Collider.
When physicists at Fermilab smash particles together, most of what comes out of the collisions is well understood. But every once in awhile strange things appear in the data—incidents popularly known as zoo events.
