Watch the northern or southern lights

Created by high-energy particles slamming into gas in the upper atmosphere, the aurorae are particle physics on a glorious scale.

northern or southern lights

Taughannock Falls
Ulysses, New York

Waterfall near Cornell University where Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, and many others went for inspiration.

Listen to Einstein, Kelvin, and Rutherford

Historic recordings available from the British Library at http://tinyurl.com/2xm4xa

Cathode ray tube used by J.J. Thomson
The Museum at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, England

Used to discover the electron in 1897.

James Clerk Maxwell's house
14 India St., Edinburgh, Scotland

Houses a small museum devoted to the discoverer of electromagnetism, who is considered the father of modern physics.

Marie Curie's office and personal laboratory
Curie Museum, Institut Curie, Paris, France

Includes 1902 lab notes on the atomic mass of radium, which are still radioactive, and Tho-Radia face cream, marketed during the "radium craze" of the 1920s.

Attend a CERN Council meeting
Geneva, Switzerland

See how major decisions in European particle physics are made. The council meets twice a year.

Explore the wreckage of a cargo plane
South Pole Station, Antarctica

Tunnels lead to the 1970s wreck, buried under 20 meters of snow; a favorite of physicists on the IceCube experiment taking a work break.

Sir Isaac Newton's birthplace, Woolsthorpe Manor
Grantham, England

Apples falling in the manor's orchard set him thinking about gravity. Dozens of places claim to have descendents of the apple tree.

Cockcroft-Walton pre-accelerator
Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois

Named after two Nobel laureates, this science-fiction-looking machine provides 750,000 volts for the initial acceleration of particles. (See photo)

Sir Isaac Newton's living room
Babson College, Babson Park, Massachusetts

Dismantled and moved here in the 1930s, joining a large collection of Newtonia.

Sir Isaac Newton's living room

Bruno Touschek's drawings
La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy

The physicist who began research into matter-antimatter collisions was also known for his deft, funny caricatures and sketches, which decorate a physics department meeting room.

Bruno Touschek drawing

Theory fish tank
Building 40, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, California

No fish here; just a glassfronted room lined with chalkboards where theorists hold discussions.

Richard Feynman's lecture hall
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California

The hall, #201 in the East Bridge physics building, was the scene of the freshman/ sophomore lectures collected in Feynman Lectures on Physics, also known as "The Red Book."

Log on to The Particle Adventure
www.particleadventure.org

An award-winning interactive tour of the particle physics world.

Read Russian physics news
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia

Pick up the latest edition of the official lab newspaper, Dubna. Science. Cooperation. Progress, which recently celebrated its 50th year. Online at http://www.jinr.ru/news.htm

Watch particle events live on the Web

See raw events coming straight from particle physics detectors around the world.

Fermilab: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/ evdisp/
SLAC: http://home.slac.stanford. edu/evdisp/
KEK: http://belle.kek.jp/evdisp/

Leaning Tower of Pisa

The first matter-antimatter collisions
Frascati National Laboratory, Italy

A diminutive prototype called AdA demonstrated the working principle that spawned the world's most powerful particle colliders.

Leaning Tower of Pisa
Pisa, Italy

Scene of a famous experiment that may never have happened: An early biographer said Galileo dropped two objects from the top to see if the heavier one fell faster. But Galileo himself never described such an experiment.

Homestake Mine

Homestake Mine
Near Lead, South Dakota

The deepest mine in the US, it was the setting for a solar neutrino experiment that won Brookhaven nuclear physicist Raymond Davis, Jr. a share of a Nobel Prize. Recently chosen by the National Science Foundation as the site of a major multipurpose underground lab.

Cosmic ray shed
Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Used for the first determination of the mass and decay time of the muon in 1937 and the discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, in 1945.

Center for History of Physics
American Center for Physics, College Park, Maryland

Archives, oral histories, online exhibits, and other resources for scholars, teachers and physics buffs. http://www.aip.org/history/

Pierre Auger Observatory
Malargüe, Argentina

Surface detectors and telescopes spread across more than 3000 square kilometers of the desolate Pampa Amarilla, awaiting rare, high-energy cosmic rays.

Einstein's blackboard
Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University, Oxford, England

Notes from a lecture he gave in the 1930s that were never erased.

Einstein's blackboard

Einstein's pipe
National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC

On display at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC, until July 2008 while its home institution is remodeled.

Einstein's apartment
Bern, Switzerland

Restored and open to the public. He lived there from 1903–05.

The Royal Institution of Great Britain
London, England

Papers and original apparatus from Michael Faraday and James Dewar, as well as William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg—father-and-son winners of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics. Closed since 2006 for major renovation.

LABEC Laboratory
Florence, Italy

This national lab specializes in using a particle beam to analyze cultural heritage items, from Galileo manuscripts to ceramics and paintings.

LABEC Laboratory

E.O. Lawrence's desk and glasses
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Also on view: correspondence congratulating him on the first successful acceleration of protons, for which he won the Nobel Prize.

Trinity test site
Alamogordo, New Mexico

Site of the first atomic bomb explosion, July 16, 1945; open to the public on the first Saturdays in April and October. Bonus point: See a piece of "trinitite," glass made of bomb-fused sand.

Take in a performance in Ramsey Auditorium
Fermilab

Performers have included Suzanne Vega, Arlo Guthrie, George Winston, and Pilobolus.

Galileo's lens
Institute and Museum of the History of Science, Florence, Italy

In 1610, he used it to discover the moons of Jupiter.

Tempio Voltiano
Como, Italy

Instruments and memorabilia of Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist who invented the electric battery and lent his name to the volt.

Tempio Voltiano

Stand in the LHC ring with one foot in France, the other in Switzerland
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

There are six places in the LHC collider tunnel where you can do this.

Alternating Gradient Synchrotron
Brookhaven National Laboratory

Particle accelerator where strong focusing was invented and put into practice. Research here led to three Nobel prizes.

The Christmas pantomime
CERN

A review of worldwide particle physics in music and song, presented by the CERN Theory Division. Scurrilous, amusing, not to be missed.

Peace Memorial Park
Hiroshima, Japan

A museum and dozens of monuments commemorate the world's first atomic bombing, August 6, 1945.

Peace Memorial Park

The first cloud chamber charged-particle detector
The Museum at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, England

C.T.R. Wilson won a Nobel Prize for inventing it.

Suit up and enter a clean room

At physics labs across the world, here's where high-tech particle detectors and accelerator components are put together.

View photos by Yuri Tumanov
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia

Photos taken during his 40 years at the lab are known throughout the physics world.

Spend a Rutherford, Bohr, Birkeland, or Tesla

All four physicists are featured on currency: Ernest Rutherford on New Zealand's $100 bill, Niels Bohr on the Danish 500 kroner note, Kristian Birkeland on the Norwegian 200 kroner, and Nikola Tesla on the Serbian 100 dinar.

Ernest Rutherford on New Zealand's $100 bill

Ernest Rutherford's birthplace
Brightwater, New Zealand

Display panels and a small garden alongside a state highway.

SNOLab
Sudbury, Canada

Journey into a working mine, then shower and change into clean-room garb to see some of the most advanced astroparticle physics experiments in the world.

Sciences-ACO museum
Anneau de Collisions d'Orsay, Paris, France

See ACO, an accelerator that made important contributions to both particle physics and synchrotron radiation research.

Main cyclotron accelerator tank, TRIUMF
Vancouver, British Columbia

Accessible during maintenance.

State-of-the-art control room
Jefferson Lab, Newport News, Virginia

The control room of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) was redone in 2004 and outfitted with a huge videoscreen to monitor operations.

SLAC research yard
Menlo Park, California

Gaze down from an overlook at the area at the end of the two-mile linear accelerator where research led to four Nobel Prizes.

Kamioka Underground Observatory
Hida city, Gifu, Japan

Drive up the mountains to what was the largest zinc mine in East Asia and visit the Kamioka mine, 1 km below the surface. It now houses a mix of cutting-edge experiments, from the Super-Kamiokande neutrino experiment to dark-matter and gravitational-wave detectors.

IceCube Neutrino Observatory
South Pole

Thousands of optical sensors are being installed to record particles penetrating 1450 to 2450 meters of Antarctic ice.

The roving Gammasphere
Argonne National Laboratory

The world's most sensitive gamma ray detector–it's in the book Guinness World Records. It has been refitted so it can travel across the floor to line up with experiments. A model of it also had a cameo in the 2003 movie The Hulk.

The Black Hole
Los Alamos, New Mexico

This junkyard, run by former Los Alamos machinist Ed Grothus, sells surplus from the Los Alamos lab.

The Black Hole (junk yard)

The DELPHI detector
LHCb cavern, CERN

Guided tour of a retired detector in a working accelerator tunnel. Leave your watch on the bus, as it could be stopped by stray magnetic fields.

Pauli room
CERN

Contains library, artifacts, and death mask of Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli, who thought up the neutrino.

Wilson Hall atrium
Fermilab

Sixteen stories tall, with an indoor garden and cafeteria.

Trees in blankets
KEK, Tsukuba, Japan

Pine trees are wrapped in straw blankets, called Komomaki, which attract moth larvae that otherwise would infest the tree. The infested blankets are burned in the spring.

The Manhattan Project
Los Alamos, New Mexico

Visit the Bradbury Science Museum to learn about the top-secret wartime quest to develop the atom bomb.

Get face to face with some of the world's largest particle-collider detectors:

Robert Wilson's sculptures
Fermilab

Four giant sculptures designed by the lab's founding director include a Möbius strip and a three-span arch called "Broken Symmetry." Bonus point: Spot the row of power poles shaped like the Greek letter pi.

Three-span arch called "Broken Symmetry"

First self-sustained nuclear chain reaction
University of Chicago, Illinois

A sculpture by Henry Moore marks the spot in a former squash court where, in 1942, Enrico Fermi and colleagues set off the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Mingle with physicists at Wine & Cheese
Fermilab

Traditional end-of-week wind-down before the weekly seminar on particle physics results.

Pioneer cemetery
Fermilab

Lab founding director Robert Wilson is buried here, along with an American general and 18 early settlers.

Museo Storico della Fisica "Enrico Fermi"
Compendio Viminale, Rome

Museum on Fermi's life and research is scheduled to open at the end of 2007 in the via Panisperna building.

See experiments in Gran Sasso National Laboratory
Assergi, Italy

The largest underground lab in the world dedicated to astroparticle physics; enter via a highway tunnel that cuts through a mountain.

Gran Sasso National Laboratory

Alternating Gradient Synchrotron
Brookhaven National Laboratory

Particle accelerator where strong focusing was invented and put into practice. Research here led to three Nobel prizes.

Stroll like Einstein
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey

Although the institute's buildings are off-limits to the public, the woodsy 500-acre nature reserve where Einstein once strolled is open year-round.

Galileo's middle finger
Institute and Museum of the History of Science, Florence, Italy

Cut off 100 years after his death and preserved as a relic.

Control console of the Harvard Cyclotron Lab
Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University

Preserved just as it was on the day it was decommissioned in 2002, the control console is a mixture of 1947 vacuum-tube era switches, mid-century meters, and later computer components. The technicians' personal touches– little jokes, take-out menus, call lists–are still there.

The computer Tim Berners-Lee used to invent the World Wide Web
CERN

Berners-Lee and colleagues created Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, the dominant way of providing information over the Internet.

Collider Experimental Hall
SLAC

This pit at the east end of the Stanford Linear Collider houses the dusty remnants of the MARK II and SLD detectors.

MARK II detector

Apparatus used to prove that parity is not conserved
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland

A team lead by Madame Chien-Shiung Wu showed our world is slightly different than its mirror image, confirming a prediction for which T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang won a Nobel Prize.

See the CERN Globe lit up at night
Geneva, Switzerland

Formally called The Globe of Science and Innovation, the 40-meter-diameter sphere is built of wood from Swiss forests. The Globe is a gift from the Swiss government for the lab's 50th anniversary.

The CERN Globe

Bubble Chamber Cemetery
Brookhaven National Laboratory

Reminders of the evolution of detector technology.

Bubble Chamber Cemetery

The first cyclotron
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The first cyclotron, a device to accelerate charged particles such as electrons to higher energies, was built under the direction of its inventor, Ernest O. Lawrence, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1930. Charged particles injected near the center move in semicircles; as the particle's energy increases, its semi-circles grow larger. Cyclotrons were the best source of high-energy particles for many decades.

Credits
Special thanks to the many people who contributed items to the list:

Readers Jodi Cooley-Sekula, Philip Downey, Lara Gundel, Mike Johnson, Spencer Klein, Andreas Kronfeld, Peter Lucas, David W. Miller, Ina Reichel, Stephen Sekula, Dave Wark, and John Womersley;

David Kaiser, Associate Professor, Program in Science, Technology & Society, and Lecturer, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;

Sara Schechner, David P. Wheatland Curator, Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University;

Roger Sherman, Associate Curator, Modern Physics Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution;

Spencer Weart, Director, Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics;

and the editorial staff and contributing editors of symmetry, located at particle physics laboratories across the world.

Photo Credits
Babson College, Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN, Cornell University, Fermilab, Gran Sasso National Laboratory, LABEC Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Museo Storico della Fisica, Oxford University, SLAC, Touschek family