At a recent symposium honoring former Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Director Jonathan Dorfan, dinner guests were treated to a course of the unexpected.
Neutrino masses are extremely difficult to measure. While we know precisely how much an electron weighs, we have little information on the mass of its neutral partner, the electron neutrino. The same is true of the muon neutrino and tau neutrino.
As passengers boarded the train in a Berlin suburb, researchers from the Large Hadron Collider greeted them: Imagine you are a proton and this train is the LHC tunnel. You will travel 37 km, slightly more than the 27 km it takes the protons to circle the LHC tunnel.
Blackboards filled with mathematical equations and scientific machines as large as cathedrals can awe, and sometimes overwhelm. But Koosh balls are another matter.
Hugh Montgomery has taken the helm of the Department of Energys Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia after almost 25 years at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. He is JLabs third director, replacing retiring Christoph Leemann.
Physicist Les Cottrell is the meteorologist of Internet weather. His project tests the strength of Internet connections around the worldand finds Africa lagging farther and farther behind.
Ask any physicist: The most common question we hear from family/friends/random strangers in the next seat on the plane is, What is it, exactly, that you do? I have even been asked straight up, High-energy physics? Is that a real job?