The history of Louisiana is closely intertwined with tragedies. My father, who turns 90 this fall, vividly remembers the Great Flood of 1927. "You could take a boat from Monroe, Louisiana, to Jackson, Mississippi," he says, a trip of over 120 miles.
Physicists are dedicated to their work, but it often bleeds into their home and personal lives. Reading this issue of symmetry gives me a converse impression—just how human physicists are as they work.
At the CERN Scientific Policy Committee meeting held on June 18-19, 1979, the construction of LEP, the Large Electron-Positron collider, was on the agenda.
This August, one hundred and fifty postdocs and advanced graduate students from around the world will gather on the Illinois prairie to enhance their understanding of particle colliders at the CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School.
When the LHC collider and its experiments are being switched on in 2007, scientists around the world will be eager to monitor the start-up in real time. But physicists won't have to be at the LHC site to monitor the hardware they built or to determine what tuning they need to do.
The Large Hadron Collider, to start up in late 2007, traces its inception back to 1979. There are already more than 4000 papers in the SPIRES database that are about the LHC, either mentioning its name in the title or referring to it in a significant way.
When the CERN safety team and I heard the loud rumbling 25 meters underground, we weren't concerned. With no warning, it would have been frightening, but the rush of water through pipes overhead presaged a thrilling event.
The compulsion in all of us to search for the truth, to search for the meaning of life and the origin of the world, is the force uniting us on the Compact Muon Solenoid detector experiment –- 2000+ people, from 182 institutions, in 38 different countries.
In pursuit of some of the most exciting science of our time, the Large Hadron Collider has pushed the boundaries of technology and the scale of science experiments to new extremes.
Walk into the main CERN cafeteria at various times of the day and you'll find different scenes: scientists discussing results over coffee; a parent coaxing his children to finish lunch before swooping them back to the nursery school on site; groups of grad students soaking up the sun on the
In a typical high school physics textbook, says scienceeducation specialist Beth Marchant, only the last chapter is devoted to all the developments since 1900–the stuff that physicists are actually working on today.
To deal with the computing demands of the LHC experiments, scientists have created the world's largest, most international distributed-computing system.
