It's a challenging time for particle physics in the United States. The outlook for federal spending for physics research—indeed for all of science—is uncertain.
In the snowy twilight of an early winter evening I was driving south on Vermont Route 14 when two moose emerged from the woods and crossed the road a few yards in front of my car. Immediately, I thought of the Higgs boson.
Just after 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 30, Fermilab accelerator pioneer Helen Edwards prepared to stop the circulation of subatomic particles in the Tevatron collider for the last time. She was a fitting choice; Edwards and her husband, Don, had led the Tevatron start-up nearly three decades earlier.
How the public release of data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s main instrument has affected the hundreds of researchers who use it—and resulted in more and better science.
