By demonstrating through experiment the reality of quarks, Taylor helped lay the foundation of what scientists know as the Standard Model of particle physics.
In 2023, the ALICE experiment was ready for their best year yet, until a mysterious signal threatened everything. As the LHC wraps up its 2025 lead-ion run, physicists recall how they worked together to solve the puzzle.
Robert Wilson, the first director of Fermilab, was both scientist and artist. There are many anecdotes about his interest in and promotion of art at Fermilab. Over many years I have observed that physical scientists often have a deep interest in the arts.
The most-cited paper in theoretical particle physics in 2004 was "A large mass hierarchy from a small extra dimension" by Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum, published in Physical Review Letters in 1999.
"It's funny to see how people react to it. Non-technical people steer wide and won't touch it, while engineers and designers, people you wouldn't think of as given to humor, will stand in front of it until it moves around or put a handkerchief on the wireless camera.
The future of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center involves a broadening from traditional particle physics experiments to research from subatomic to cosmological scales.
Tomorrow's particle physics experiments are redrawing the map for scientific collaboration. Although the field has long been accustomed to large groups of scientists, life in the new CERN collaborations will surely be different.