Stories abound about how particle physics benefits education, the economy, and society as a whole. Quantifying those benefits would help particle physics better demonstrate its value to the country.
Many of the people trained in particle physics move on to jobs in industry, where their skills are in high demand. There you can find a theorist exploring for oil or an accelerator scientist working on cancer treatments.
When it comes to getting rid of cancer, the sharpest scalpel may be a proton beam. Technology conceived and hatched in highenergy physics is now treating thousands of patients per year, with fewer side effects.
The life-saving medical technology known as Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI, makes detailed images of soft tissue in the body, nearly eliminating the need for exploratory surgery.
On the hit television show Numb3rs, where crimes are solved with math and science, cosmologist and theoretical physicist Larry Fleinhardt has lived in a monastery and flown into space searching for a sense of purpose. The next step takes him to Fermilab.
Peter Fisher was in the audience when Marin Soljacic, a fellow physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave a lunchtime talk about a technology that could transform consumer electronics.
With a blue marker poised at a large white flip chart, Maury Tigner, a physicist at Cornell University, turned to a group of about 10 representatives from industry and asked, “What kind of applications interest your company?” The room was cramped and beige, a generic hotel meeting spa
A surgeon and a scratch golfer most of his adult life, a US Army officer in World War II, the doctor gave up his medical practice in his 60s while exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior–such as meandering down to a favorite car dealer in his prosperous New Jersey town, and signing the pap
