Pick a number: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, 101, 103, 107, 109, 113 and so on and on and on and on . Get the picture?
With his genius and his unmistakable appearance, Albert Einstein is an icon of both science and culture. Since his passing Einstein has inspired films, books, and even an opera, Einstein on the Beach. Not surprisingly, his popularity pays off handsomely.
"Since middle school, I've always had plans to get rich," says Michael Binger, a theoretical particle physicist at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. On August 11, 2006 his dream came true: Binger placed third at the World Series of Poker Championships in Las Vegas.
At the CERN Scientific Policy Committee meeting held on June 18-19, 1979, the construction of LEP, the Large Electron-Positron collider, was on the agenda.
To deal with the computing demands of the LHC experiments, scientists have created the world's largest, most international distributed-computing system.
When the LHC collider and its experiments are being switched on in 2007, scientists around the world will be eager to monitor the start-up in real time. But physicists won't have to be at the LHC site to monitor the hardware they built or to determine what tuning they need to do.
In a typical high school physics textbook, says scienceeducation specialist Beth Marchant, only the last chapter is devoted to all the developments since 1900–the stuff that physicists are actually working on today.