Archive

11/01/07

Dark energy

In the fall of 1997, I was leading the calibration and analysis of data gathered by the High-z Supernova Search Team, one of two teams of scientists the other was the Supernova Cosmology Projecttrying to determine the fate of our universe: Will it expand forever, or will it halt and contract, r

11/01/07

In the tunnel

While looking through the Aug 07 issue of symmetry, I enjoyed reading Glennda Chui’s article “The particle physics life list.” There’s a picture of “Hans Bethe and friend” touring what is now the CESR tunnel at Cornell University’s Laboratory for Elementary-Particle Physics.

11/01/07

Steering a dragon

Since I visited Fermilab almost seven years ago on a cross-country trip, I’ve enjoyed keeping in virtual touch with the world of high-energy physics, first through FermiNews and now through symmetry.

11/01/07

Bauhaus particle physics

Some of these paintings by Roshan Houshmand (symmetry, Jun/Jul 07) remind me of the works of Paul Klee (of the Bauhaus School in the 1920s in Germany) and also those of Joan Miró to some extent in another way. Certainly her painting “Retro” connects in my mind with Kandinsky.

11/01/07

GEQ***T

When Tom Nash bought a new Porsche 911 Carrera 4, he wanted to give it some personal flair. So he applied for a custom license plate: GEQ8PIT.

11/01/07

You have 3Hψi new messages

JoAnne Hewett’s most recent paper is a collaboration between physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

11/01/07

Déjà blue

As Clark Cully watched the movie Déjà Vu with his parents, something about the movie’s time machine—with its bright blue wedges of metal spewing a ring of wires—seemed eerily familiar.

11/01/07

Scary Ben

It was 80 degrees under a cloudless sky in St. Charles, Illinois. Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed, striking a kite and shooting down the string to a bald scarecrow. Its giant eyes glowed. “What’s that?” asked a Girl Scout working on a nearby display.

11/01/07

Row, row, row...

Monica Dunford couldn’t stop swaying when she finally got out of the boat after 15 hours, 33 minutes, and 15 seconds of hard rowing. The physicist and her four teammates had just won the Tour du Leman, held Sept. 22.

11/01/07

Jets

A jet forms when a quark or gluon is produced in a high-energy particle collision.

11/01/07

Emily Saltijeral-DeMar: An in-depth look at a deep place

Our tour guide encouraged us to look at our destination, the NuMI tunnel, some 300 feet below. Standing next to the rail, one hand holding my hard hat in place and the other keeping my glasses from flying off, I looked down into what seemed to be a bottomless pit.

11/01/07

Author list

The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) is one of two experiments that record the debris of powerful proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron particle collider to explore subatomic processes.

11/01/07

DUSEL mine tour

In March 2007, members of a US National Science Foundation panel went on a whirlwind bus tour of potential sites for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. Here's an account of that trip by Peter Fisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

11/01/07

The wrong stuff

Physicist Brian Cox has been watching science fiction movies since he was a small child. He always scoffed at the imprecise nature of the science in movies. But over the past year, he learned a lot about the balance between making a movie entertaining and making it scientifically correct.

11/01/07

On the trail of cosmic bullets

Do the most energetic particles in the universe come from supermassive black holes? New results from the Pierre Auger Observatory make that case.

11/01/07

Free for all

The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine. It doesn’t even involve subatomic particles—unless you count the electrons that flow through electronic circuits, carrying bits of information from one human brain to the next.