Take one part unidentified goop. Add three parts mysterious energy. Throw in a dash of ordinary atoms. Mix. Compress. Explode. Let expand for 13.7 billion years.
Science is a forward-thinking endeavor: It is more concerned with what can be discovered in the future than what has been learned in the past. Once accomplished, successes are usually taken for granted.
In October 2006, the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) provided a new roadmap for a broad and very exciting science agenda in particle physics research. The roadmap’s destinations are among the most intriguing questions in science.
Lovers and insomniacs have enjoyed the night sky for millennia. With the surprising observation that stars are less than five percent of the universe, it is natural that there would be a proliferation of books for the layman about the other 95 percent.
Jodi Cooley works half a mile underground, in a mine that stopped operating 40 years ago. A rattling elevator takes her to work, 27 floors beneath the surface. The ride down the mineshaft is five minutes of complete darkness. A colony of bats inhabits the mine.
The worldwide particle physics community is about to sail on a voyage into a New World of discovery. The Large Hadron Collider, a multi-billion-dollar particle collider that will begin operations in Europe in 2007, will take us into new realms of energy, space, time, and symmetry.
We are at a time of extraordinary scientific opportunity, when the prospect for making major advances in elementary particle physics is greater than it has been in at least three decades.
Supersymmetry. Dark matter. Extra dimensions. Scientists have proposed the International Linear Collider (ILC), a next-generation project designed to smash together electrons and their antiparticles at a higher-than-ever energy, to learn more about these and other mysteries of the universe.
Particle physics detectors in space will record gamma rays in search of dark matter, the evolution of stars, and natures most powerful particle accelerators.
Whenever I have met with high-energy physicists in recent months, conversation has always turned to the charge to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel subpanel known as P5, the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, to consider the future of the two biggest US accelerator-based programs
I have heard conflicting reports as to who decided to call one of the most spectacular intellectual innovations of human history "the Standard Model," physicists' best construct for explaining the range and behavior of elementary particles that make up the universe as we know it.
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?
