Neutron scattering research has improved the quality of many everyday items: Shatter-proof windshields, credit cards, pocket calculators, airplanes, compact discs, and magnetic storage tapes are just some examples.
Physics has demonstrated that the everyday phenomena we experience are governed by universal principles applying at time and distance scales far beyond normal human experience.
In October 2003, I gave an evening talk at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The subject was nature on the familiar scale, the kind embodied in the restored prairie on the Fermilab campus–some 1200 acres of compass plant and rattlesnake master and other species.
The sighting of Jupiter's moons by Galileo Galilei resonates through science and history. Using a handmade telescope in January 1610, Galileo confirmed the Copernican theory that the planets moved around the sun; the Earth was not the center of the solar system.
Clouds of electrons could block the view of new discoveries at the proposed ILC, a multi-billion-dollar particle collider. Eliminating those clouds is critical to the prspects for the machine's success.
A fact of life for aspiring physicists is that others won't get to know who you are by reading your papers–they'll read your papers if they know who you are.
Physicists live to experiment: usually in a lab, but at times in different venues. The National Academies committee that recently looked into the future of US particle physics was a new kind of non-laboratory experiment for the physics community.
The neutrino experiment K2K (KEK to Kamioka) collaboration shares a logbook with Super-Kamiokande scientists at its far detector site 250 kilometers from KEK in Tsukuba.
It was very funny to read the cover-story of the March issue, when Ruth Howes mentions the feeling she got from fellow physicists: "It was about who could work hardest and who could be the tiredest"—this is indeed widespread in the physics community.
Using Nobel laureate Abdus Salam as an example, Mart (symmetry, February 2006) informed readers that papers of symposium proceedings received no citation count and fortunately, the Nobel committee dug out the paper in a proceeding and recognized the originality as well as priority of Salam's
Pakistan does not have a long history of domestic particle physics experiments, but the country is nevertheless finding ways to contribute to international efforts.
