Skip to main content

latest news

12/08/16

A syllabus in cosmic rays

What have scientists learned in five years of studying cosmic rays with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment?

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.

03/01/05

What's in a name?

I have heard conflicting reports as to who decided to call one of the most spectacular intellectual innovations of human history "the Standard Model," physicists' best construct for explaining the range and behavior of elementary particles that make up the universe as we know it.

03/01/05

The doorkeepers of building 280

Unless you're looking for them, you might not notice the two stone gargoyles standing watch over building 280 at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In fact, for the first month they were in place, not many people did notice them.

03/01/05

Supersymmetry

Supersymmetry is a proposed property of the universe.

02/01/05

Special relativity

Einstein had promised but later refused to publish this 1912 expository treatise, his earliest known manuscript on special relativity. No original manuscripts survive for the articles of Einstein’s 1905 annus mirabilis.

02/01/05

SLAC race

The near-perfect weather in California inspires many SLAC employees to enjoy jogging and walking at lunch time. The long, straight stretch beside the world's longest building, the klystron gallery of the two-mile Stanford Linear Accelerator, seems to compel exercise.

02/01/05

Hot relationships

The growing relationship of astrophysics and particle physics is a hot topic these days. In addition to the appearance of new faces and institutions at the labs, the growth of this area of research can actually be seen in the references of particle physics papers.

02/01/05

Event display

Finding new species of particles isn’t as easy as simply watching them fly out of a collider experiment.