Some might think it strange that data taken from the Radio Ice Cerenkov Experiment, a kilometer-wide neutrino detection system buried in South Pole ice sheets, is analyzed with the help of a cigarette lighter.
The past decade has seen an explosion of books about physics for the non-specialist. However, few of their authors ever get their hands really dirty in among the actual experiments that drive progress in physics.
After waiting more than a year for safety and maintenance arrangements, sculptor Douglas Abdell's Kryeti-Aekyad set foot outside the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's main auditorium on August 6.
People say that nothing is perfect. I beg to differ. The notion of symmetry is both perfect and nothing—a combination that gives it unreasonable effectiveness in physics.
When her Basque grandmother—Amatxi—taught five-year-old Anyes Taffard the language of her ancestors, she overlooked the Basque term for physicist: fisikari. But by the time she was 12, Taffard was already drawn to mathematics and science.
Scientists and their families are finding they must adapt to the increasingly international nature of particle physics. The effects on family life go far beyond jet lag and it's up to individuals to navigate the foreign terrain.
It was 10 p.m. Thursday in California, midnight Thursday in Chicago, 7 a.m. Friday in Europe, 1 p.m. Friday in China and 2 p.m. Friday in Japan when Jonathan Dorfan stood up to announce the recommendation of the International Technology Recommendation Panel.
"Large scale networks of computing resources in the service of the most computationally intensive problems of the future" is one vision of the Grid, being developed by computer scientists and physicists around the globe.
These are unusually exciting times to be a physicist. At the dawn of the new millennium, some of the essential questions for humanity have taken a new urgency. What is our universe made of, and how did it get to look the way it does? What is the underlying nature of space and time?
A curious paradox faces modern science. Scientists are specializing more than ever before within their fields of research but some of the greatest progress is being made by those who bridge fields using a cross-fertilization of ideas.
