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05/01/07

More famous undercited physicists

The numbers on citations and all listed by Heath O'Connell (Mar 07) are exceedingly interesting! The general phenomenon has been known to people working in scientometrics for many decades, and is called "incorporation."

05/01/07

Black holes for beginners

I read the nice article by Jennifer Ouellette "Beginner's mind" in the March 2007 edition with great interest.

05/01/07

Aspirins in times of war

I know of the use of aspirins as water detectors (Apr 07) from my year and a half (June 70 to –Jan 72) in the US Army in the Republic of South Vietnam on the receiving end. I heard from people who had been there in the late 1960s that it had been used then as well.

05/01/07

Nice ice

A recent article by scientists in Leeds and Oslo featured in CERN's "Picked Up for You" might have an answer to Terry Anderson's ice-related question in March's symmetry.

05/01/07

Name that particle

Cartoonist Roz Chast has busted the field of particle physics wide open with her pioneering cover for this issue of symmetry. We say it's about time: Why limit ourselves to the same old list of particles that have actually been discovered, or at least properly theorized?

05/01/07

A tale of dark energy

In the 1990s, astronomical observations revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Not knowing what causes this acceleration, scientists began to attribute the phenomenon to some unknown source of energy, coined "dark energy" by astrophysicist Michael Turner.

05/01/07

Farmers' picnic

Just inside the site boundary, secluded from most of Fermilab, sits Leonard Baumann's rickety red barn. Baumann, like 55 other farmers, relocated 40 years ago to make way for the construction of Fermilab.

05/01/07

Those pesky humans

Lead bricks and radiation gloves normally indicate a need to protect lab workers from radioactivity. For a laboratory at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, however, the opposite is true.

05/01/07

Tesla in paradise

Even in the company of a two-story nose-picking machine, human cupcakes, battling robots, and power-tool drag races, the giant Tesla coil stands out. Maybe it's the loud buzz and crackle of artificial lightning bolts, writhing like fiery serpents from the top of the thing.

05/01/07

Wait just a minute

Berkeley Lab physicist Hitoshi Murayama and SLAC physicist Herman Winick have provided audio segments for One-Minute How-To, a Web site that provides 60-second explanations ranging from "How to write a flawless email," to "How to organize a river clean-up," to "How to sto

05/01/07

Peel and stick

Chip Edstrom routinely tidies the Fermilab Main Control Room to stay awake while working as an accelerator operator on the owl shift. One night, while cleaning equipment and peeling off decades-old labels, Edstrom decided to replace the old ones with fresh ones. In Russian.

An illustration of twisting ropes
05/01/07

String theory

According to string theory, matter is made up of strings.

05/01/07

Pierre Schwob: Launched into science

Sputnik, the first satellite sent into Earth orbit, was launched October 4, 1957, –my 11th birthday, so I remember the date. It was also the first time I found my father seemingly interested in science and technology.

05/01/07

Ken McMullen: Arrows of time

Ken McMullen says he does not feel comfortable with categories. That's why when, given a choice between defining himself as a painter or a film-maker, he prefers to be called an artist instead.

05/01/07

Katie & Adam Yurkewicz: Bon voyage

In August 2006, after almost a year of preparation, we packed up all our belongings to move from Batavia, Illinois, to Geneva, Switzerland. We were following our particle physics careers from Fermilab to CERN, the European particle physics lab.