Skip to main content

latest news

03/01/05

The smoking mouse

Because particle physicists cannot directly see the objects they study, they rely on deduction and decay products to detect nature's tiny, ephemeral particles.

03/01/05

Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics

Do you know why Louis Victor de Broglie won a Nobel Prize in 1929? Or why a Nobel Prize wasn't given out in 1934? What about Nils Gustaf Dalen's invention of an automatic sun valve beating out Max Planck and Albert Einstein for the Nobel Prize in 1912?

03/01/05

Microchip

Custom designed microchips have become essential in processing signals from modern physics experiments that generate lots of data. This chip, the QIE9, designed by Fermilab engineers, is just one example of the many Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) used in such experiments.

03/01/05

A badge of honor and buffalo

Fermilab's new Girl Scout badge has troop #312 excited about "atoms and buffalo." Unlike a field trip where kids visit Fermilab to learn about physics in an "educational environment," the Girl Scouts' Fermilab outing lets kids come with their friends and a scout lead

03/01/05

Good-natured community relations

Working at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, you never know what projects may come your way. So when Helen Quinn, head of education outreach at SLAC, asked me to plant trees with a class of fourth graders, I said sure, it's not rocket science.

03/01/05

Peter Ginter: Visions of particle physics

Physicists and scientists of other disciplines around the world have created countless research sites that remind me of the colossal dimensions of ancient temples, in one way; and, in another, of fragile, beautiful little altars where they orchestrate experiments, with research objects largely in

03/01/05

The growth of e-printing

Before the days of the World Wide Web, scientists would mail their colleagues preprints, hard copies of papers submitted to scientific journals. In 1991, particle physicists began posting these papers on the Web, calling them e-prints.