As physicists have delved deeper and deeper into nature’s mysteries, they have been forced to accept the unsettling fact that our universe is suspiciously fine-tuned to support life.
Building the parts for the Large Hadron Collider has presented challenges but taught many lessons for both particle physics laboratories and their industry partners.
When the LHC collider and its experiments are being switched on in 2007, scientists around the world will be eager to monitor the start-up in real time. But physicists won't have to be at the LHC site to monitor the hardware they built or to determine what tuning they need to do.
To deal with the computing demands of the LHC experiments, scientists have created the world's largest, most international distributed-computing system.
This August, one hundred and fifty postdocs and advanced graduate students from around the world will gather on the Illinois prairie to enhance their understanding of particle colliders at the CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School.
In a typical high school physics textbook, says scienceeducation specialist Beth Marchant, only the last chapter is devoted to all the developments since 1900–the stuff that physicists are actually working on today.
In pursuit of some of the most exciting science of our time, the Large Hadron Collider has pushed the boundaries of technology and the scale of science experiments to new extremes.
When the CERN safety team and I heard the loud rumbling 25 meters underground, we weren't concerned. With no warning, it would have been frightening, but the rush of water through pipes overhead presaged a thrilling event.