It was 80 degrees under a cloudless sky in St. Charles, Illinois. Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed, striking a kite and shooting down the string to a bald scarecrow. Its giant eyes glowed. “What’s that?” asked a Girl Scout working on a nearby display.
The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine. It doesn’t even involve subatomic particles—unless you count the electrons that flow through electronic circuits, carrying bits of information from one human brain to the next.
On October 19, 1991, at 6:50 p.m., Bjørn Wiik logged the first collisions in the new electron-proton particle collider at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg.
Men and women wearing gaudy dresses, looking for customers under garish neon signs—this is a common sight in Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku, a famous entertainment and red-light district in Tokyo, Japan.
An impromptu frog habitat vanished with final repairs to the roof of Fermilab's Meson Lab. Leaks—lots of leaks—have plagued the lab's 12 blue and orange concave arches since it opened 32 years ago.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois has a challenge: how will it maintain its central role as a place where particle accelerators produce groundbreaking discoveries in physics?