A surgeon and a scratch golfer most of his adult life, a US Army officer in World War II, the doctor gave up his medical practice in his 60s while exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior–such as meandering down to a favorite car dealer in his prosperous New Jersey town, and signing the pap
The Stanford Linear Accelerator pumps large amounts of energy into beams of electrons and positrons, sending them into the PEP-II storage ring where the particles can collide, revealing the secrets of fundamental particle processes.
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.
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.
In biology, there is a loose rule of thumb that says the bigger an organism, the longer its life will be. If Fermilab's "Jolly Green Giant" is any indication, the rule may also apply to equipment in high-energy physics.