I have heard conflicting reports as to who decided to call one of the most spectacular intellectual innovations of human history "the Standard Model," physicists' best construct for explaining the range and behavior of elementary particles that make up the universe as we know it.
Einstein had promised but later refused to publish this 1912 expository treatise, his earliest known manuscript on special relativity. No original manuscripts survive for the articles of Einsteins 1905 annus mirabilis.
At almost any particle physics conference, meeting, or lunch table, the phrase "physics beyond the Standard Model" is heard over and over again. What's wrong with the Standard Model, anyway? Why are physicists so sure that there is something beyond it?
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, a crew of four to five operators plus a crew chief are on shift in Fermilab's Main Control Room, monitoring the accelerator complex.
Quantum Diaries follows the lives of scientists from around the world as they live the World Year of Physics 2005. In their own words, in photos, blogs and videos, they tell the real-life stories of real physicists in real time.
So who's this Einstein guy I keep hearing about? He writes these five papers a hundred years ago, and now the whole world wants a year to glorify him? Booshwah, I say.
By day, Stephon Alexander theorizes about the effects of dark matter in his office at SLAC. By night he plays tenor saxophone in a San Francisco jazz club.