A first-person view of physics history

Party poopers

Party poopers

Photo: Diana Rogers, SLAC
Busloads of new Stanford graduates and their families admired the field of golden grass on SLAC's eastern-most hill on a sunny Saturday in May. But their stunned tour guides looked in dismay as they sought 50 bright red balloons.

ILC organization

Planning designing, and funding the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC), a 40-kilometer-long electron-positron collider costing billions of dollars, will require global participation and global organization.

Two tribes become one

A physicist who has devoted his career to developing linear colliders confronts the decision that changed the global physics community and the focus of his work.

Hot extra dimensions

The most-cited paper in theoretical particle physics in 2004 was "A large mass hierarchy from a small extra dimension" by Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum, published in Physical Review Letters in 1999.

Starship it's not

"It's funny to see how people react to it. Non-technical people steer wide and won't touch it, while engineers and designers, people you wouldn't think of as given to humor, will stand in front of it until it moves around or put a handkerchief on the wireless camera.

Extra dimensions

Extra dimensions sound like science fiction, but they could be part of the real world.

No little plans

In his vision for Fermilab's future, director Pier Oddone offers insight from a bumper sticker: "If you want to predict the future, help create it."

Collider detector

To understand the subatomic processes unfolding at the center of powerful particle collisions, scientists design and build huge, massive detectors.