At a recent symposium honoring former Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Director Jonathan Dorfan, dinner guests were treated to a course of the unexpected.
In May 1983, physicists on the UA1 detector for the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator at CERN made the first definitive observations of the Z boson.
Parked between a shiny green Camaro and a remodeled '63 Mustang, a 1929 Ford Model A pickup-turned-hot rod is a mosaic of rust and rot. A rag plugs the radiator, and ancient wooden slats border the truck bed.
Some days Jerry Zimmerman calmly follows his typical morning routine and joins countless other suburbanites on the road to work. Then there are the other days. Those days Zimmerman takes on an alter-persona.