The Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab set a world record on Sunday afternoon, July 3, 1983, achieving a beam energy of 512 billion electronvolts (GeV). Accelerator operators had made the first-ever attempt at accelerating a beam in the Tevatron at 3:12 a.m. that day, reaching 250 GeV.
Quick, give an example of a first name of a physicist. Albert? Benjamin? Sure, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin are famous examples. But their first names are rather unusual.
Sometimes it takes the most impressive equipment in the world to find the smallest, most easily overlooked particles in the universe. Fermilab's Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) project is a perfect example.
Here they measure the time not in minutes or hours. Instead they think in terms of how many antiprotons are ready to stack and how soon the Tevatron will be ready to accept new beam. Or how fast they need to fix something, any time of the day or night. Or how long they can stay awake.
During a recent trip to CERN on the Franco-Swiss border, my fellow International Linear Collider communicators and I gathered in the cafeteria for tea and coffee.
A newly structured High Energy Physics Advisory Panel met in Washington, DC, to provide advice to the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation and to hear science policy-makers’ responses to the President’s budget request.
