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10/03/17

Nobel recognizes gravitational wave discovery

Scientists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for their roles in creating the LIGO experiment.

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Curiouser and curiouser: a riddle at the ALICE detector

12/09/25

Sarah Charley

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.

01/01/05

Seiching

Maori lore says that the rising and falling of the water level in Lake Wakatipu every 51 minutes is due to the breathing of the giant sleeping beneath.

01/01/05

Fine-tune this

Quick, what's 987654321 divided by 123456789? The answer is close to 8, but not exactly 8. Why does the result differ by about a tenth of a million, yielding 8.0000000729...?

01/01/05

Dawn Meson: Orders of magnitude

From cave paintings of bison to Monet landscapes, artists have studied and interpreted the natural world. Dawn Neal Meson, a San Francisco artist, has taken this theme one level further, or, rather, many orders of magnitude smaller.

01/01/05

Trends in extra dimensions

Sometimes old papers can be highly influential, decades after their publication.

11/01/04

Tau lepton

The discovery of an elementary particle that looked a lot like the electron, but had 3500 times its mass stunned most particle physicists three decades ago.

11/01/04

Secret city

Snezhinsk, Russia, kept a secret for 35 years—its own existence.

11/01/04

Author growth

The SPIRES databases, run by a collaboration of SLAC, Fermilab and DESY libraries, have a wealth of information about the field of particle physics.

11/01/04

The Grid

"Large scale networks of computing resources in the service of the most computationally intensive problems of the future" is one vision of the Grid, being developed by computer scientists and physicists around the globe.

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