The spotlight caught Todd Satogata. The camera zoomed in. “Did your particle beam shoot down a UFO?” the TV host asked. The accelerator physicist at RHIC, Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, smiled. Of course not.
Gold! That precious metal has been a constant measure of value to mankind. Fortunes have been made or lost, empires have risen or fallen, all in the pursuit of the Mother Lode. Such is the case of Lead, South Dakota.
Look at the periodic table of elements, and youd be hard pressed to find an element that is not used in physics. But what are the most important elements for building accelerators, detecting particles, and solving the mysteries of the universe?
Helium is the lifeblood of large particle accelerators. As the worlds supply dwindles, the particle physics community must take steps to preserve this precious commodity or learn to live without it.
Gazing into space, scientists wonder why the universe is expanding ever faster. What mysterious force is at work? By recording the light from hundreds of millions of galaxies from a mountaintop in Chile, they hope to find out what's going on.
When it comes to training, hiring, and retaining women and members of ethnic minorities, particle physics lags far behind other fields of science. Staffers at three national labs Fermilab, SLAC, and Brookhavenare attacking the problem at every level.
From the beginning, science and communication have been connected. Writing is a good exercise for inquiring minds; this is not just a saying, but a fact.
Women and minorities are significantly underrepresented in physics. There are many possible reasons for the imbalance, and understanding the causes is a challenging task.
