Three-year-old Madeleine Rogers stands inside the spooky remains of a 275-pound pumpkin grown by her father, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center engineer Reggie Rogers.
Call it subtle irony: The ground breaking for SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) took place among earth movers that had already been busily transforming the rolling California landscape for weeks.
The big-bang theory of the early universe implies that the universe is immersed in a bath of microwave light, a cooled-down remnant of early high-temperature radiation, invisible to the naked eye.
Cavities propel charged particles by transferring energy from electromagnetic waves to the particles, speeding them up. Superconducting cavities are made of material that can conduct electric currents without resistance at a very low temperature.
There's a new scientific path in Princeton, New Jersey. Out of the loam of a vacant lot, a cluster of quasicrystals winks at some pink plasma. Tectonic plates shift, and neurons connect in a hippocampus curve of bamboo.
The highest-energy particle accelerator in the world, Fermilab's Tevatron, boasts four miles of particle-accelerating circumference. But during thunderstorms it can become a bull's-eye for stray lightning bolts that demonstrate the intimidating power of nature.
