A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication
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03/01/05

Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics

Do you know why Louis Victor de Broglie won a Nobel Prize in 1929? Or why a Nobel Prize wasn't given out in 1934? What about Nils Gustaf Dalen's invention of an automatic sun valve beating out Max Planck and Albert Einstein for the Nobel Prize in 1912?

03/01/05

The smoking mouse

Because particle physicists cannot directly see the objects they study, they rely on deduction and decay products to detect nature's tiny, ephemeral particles.

03/01/05

What's in a name?

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.

Illustration of dancers without partners
03/01/05

Supersymmetry

Supersymmetry is a proposed property of the universe.

03/01/05

X-ray blaze on an invisible world

With laser-precise x-ray vision, the Linac Coherent Light Source will be an unprecedented tool to see how ultra-fast, ultra-small things work.

03/01/05

Peter Ginter: Visions of particle physics

Physicists and scientists of other disciplines around the world have created countless research sites that remind me of the colossal dimensions of ancient temples, in one way; and, in another, of fragile, beautiful little altars where they orchestrate experiments, with research objects largely in

03/01/05

Microchip

Custom designed microchips have become essential in processing signals from modern physics experiments that generate lots of data. This chip, the QIE9, designed by Fermilab engineers, is just one example of the many Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) used in such experiments.

03/01/05

EPP2010

The National Academy of Sciences has charged a group of scientists, the "Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st Century" (EPP2010) committee, with "prioritizing the scientific questions and opportunities that define elementary-particle physics." Importantly, half the committe

Logbook of February 2005
02/01/05

Special relativity

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 Einstein’s 1905 annus mirabilis.

02/01/05

Robert Bluhm: The death of common sense

Prior to the development of special relativity, the laws of physics and the laws of common sense were practically one and the same. Measurements of space and time were absolute. There were no limits in principle on how fast a person could travel.

02/01/05

Dimitri A. Dimitroyannis: Grid to fight cancer

Radiotherapy Grid computing offers an application of high-energy physics research-work- still-in-progress with tangible and immediate clinical utility to the one million Americans who will be treated with radiotherapy next year.

02/01/05

symmetry vs. vikings

Out here in rural Stearns County, Minnesota, I have taken to leaving my copy of symmetry on the coffee table. Then when people ask, “Say, what is this all about?” I casually reply, “Oh, that's a little magazine that Fermilab and SLAC send me every month. Would you like to read it?”

02/01/05

Pixel art

Inspired by the pixel structure of far away objects in astronomical images, artist Tim Otto Roth uses live scientific data to create visions of science in action.