So who's this Einstein guy I keep hearing about? He writes these five papers a hundred years ago, and now the whole world wants a year to glorify him? Booshwah, I say.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, a crew of four to five operators plus a crew chief are on shift in Fermilab's Main Control Room, monitoring the accelerator complex.
It's my first day visiting SLAC—I'm researching a movie script wherein the main character is a physicist—and I'm riding the Stanford shuttle bus to meet some physicists. There's one other passenger, a studious-looking fellow with a briefcase.
Quantum Diaries follows the lives of scientists from around the world as they live the World Year of Physics 2005. In their own words, in photos, blogs and videos, they tell the real-life stories of real physicists in real time.
At almost any particle physics conference, meeting, or lunch table, the phrase "physics beyond the Standard Model" is heard over and over again. What's wrong with the Standard Model, anyway? Why are physicists so sure that there is something beyond it?
The most energetic particles in the universe have a message for us. The gigantic Pierre Auger Southern Observatory, still under construction in Argentina, is already trying to decipher it.
Pier Oddone, deputy director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will assume the leadership of the largest US particle physics laboratory at a time of great scientific opportunity and important decisions.
One hundred years ago, Einstein published five papers that led to revolutionary changes in our understanding of the properties of space, time and the microscopic world.
By day, Stephon Alexander theorizes about the effects of dark matter in his office at SLAC. By night he plays tenor saxophone in a San Francisco jazz club.
Physicists love to celebrate anniversaries, and this year is a particularly important one: the centennial of Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis, during which he published five papers that heralded a revolution for physics.
In 1978 Alan Guth heard about the “flatness problem” of the universe while attending a talk on cosmology—a field he was only marginally curious about. A year later, Guth found a solution.
