Three-year-old Madeleine Rogers stands inside the spooky remains of a 275-pound pumpkin grown by her father, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center engineer Reggie Rogers.
Advances in virtual control technology have shown scientists just how important humans are after all. Although scientists can now essentially operate a particle collider from anywhere in the world, having members of a team work well remotely is just as significant a challenge.
The Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) isn't scheduled to open until 2008, but the Tokai campus facility is already the site of discovery—just not of the physics variety.
As lunchtime entertainment a few years ago, I gave a talk to a group of physics journal editors. The topic was covering physics for a national newspaper, using the studies they published as grist for the mill.
For artist Lylie Fisher, particle physics is much more than a field of science. It is art: "Like art, particle physics deals with the invisible," says Fisher. "One portrays emotional and spiritual experiences; the other studies unseen matter and energy.
Call it subtle irony: The ground breaking for SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) took place among earth movers that had already been busily transforming the rolling California landscape for weeks.
If this magnet could talk, you'd hear some amazing stories. During its half-century career, this four-million-pound magnet contributed to experiments that changed our view of physics while serving some of the field's foremost experimenters, including Enrico Fermi.
Jodi Cooley works half a mile underground, in a mine that stopped operating 40 years ago. A rattling elevator takes her to work, 27 floors beneath the surface. The ride down the mineshaft is five minutes of complete darkness. A colony of bats inhabits the mine.
As work continues to complete the Large Hadron Collider in Europe and plans develop around the world for an International Linear Collider, one accelerator at the energy frontier is open for business right now. At Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, the Tevatron collider is making discoveries.
Dual-career couple placement, known to most physicists as the "two-body problem," is a major issue in both academic and industrial hiring. It has a particularly disproportionate impact on women in physics.
The startup of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is imminent, and much of the particle physics community's attention has shifted to Geneva, Switzerland. Looking even further ahead, physicists plan to use the International Linear Collider to answer the next big questions in the field.
The big-bang theory of the early universe implies that the universe is immersed in a bath of microwave light, a cooled-down remnant of early high-temperature radiation, invisible to the naked eye.
Thanks for the pictures of the pocket particle card [September issue]. I can't wait to laminate the two halves together. Yes, you will be able to tell its a reproduction, but it still looks too cool!
Reading the September issue of symmetry, I was reminded of when Larry Rosenson of MIT told me the story some years ago of being stuck on a long flight next to talkative woman.
