Tevatron
A Brief History of Atom Smashers
Smashing two things together in order to uncover their hidden properties is something hardly limited to the pleasure-inducing, dirty acts you’re now thinking about. Particle physicists all over the world have been constantly working on and improving...
The Last Days of the Tevatron
When the Tevatron opened in 1983 at Fermi National Laboratory, outside Chicago, it was the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
Motherboard TV: A Death on the Frontier
The hunt for the Higgs boson, god particle or goddamn particle, the one that gives things mass, came closer to an end on July 4. Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world's largest particle accelerator, found evidence of the...
It Did Hurt: An Interview with Fermilab Physicist Rob Roser on Searching for Higgs in America
Physicist Rob Roser is head of the Scientific Computing Division and formerly a spokesman for the CDF experiment at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator, in Batavia, Illinois, an hour outside of Chicago. The Tevatron was switched off last September, leaving...
Why America's Higgs Party Won't Be a Blowout: Fermilab’s Rob Roser on the View from the Tevatron
Tomorrow, when the world hears a giant announcement about the Higgs boson from scientists at Europe’s CERN laboratory, they might not notice its American accomplice. On Monday, the Fermi National Laboratory, or Fermilab, which is situated in the middle...
CERN Spikes the Football: Higgs Boson Discovery Coming on Fourth of July
CERN is set to announce the discovery of proof that the Higgs boson “almost certainly” exists, according to the AP. That’s a big freaking deal; it’s been more than 50 years since the God particle was first theorized, and it’s the last piece of the...
Megascience Blues: What the Death of America’s Biggest Particle Accelerator Means
The story of Fermilab is a story about keeping calm and collected on the vanguard of knowledge. Yeah, Robert Wilson, the lab’s founding director, was an impassioned, divisive figure, wrangling with the public over where to build the National...
The Biggest Physics Discovery In 50 Years?
It's a bump, a weird bump in collision data at Fermilab's "soon-to-be shuttered":http://motherboard.tv/2011/1/11/goodbye-tevatron-the-u-s-s-largest-particle-accelerator Tevatron collider. Weird bumps happen; it might not mean anything. But, as it...
Fermilab's Ghost in the Machine
Fermilab's Tevatron collider is picking up something unexplainable. Particles aren't behaving like they should. It has to do with the top quark, one of the fundamental particles. It sounds simplistic in a way, but when particles collide and shoot...
Fermilab Closes In On the Higgs Boson
Researchers at Fermilab's Tevatron particle collider are "talking big":http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2011/03/14/tevatron-experiments-report-new-higgs-search-results/ this week as they prepare to present new measurements narrowing down even...
In 1987, Ronald Reagan Was the Higgs Boson's Best Friend
I know, I know: if there's one thing lefty bloggers love pointing out, it's the disconnect between the current right-wing Ronald Reagan fantasy and the tax-raising, big-spending pragmatic reality. Well, here's a good one. If you're under a certain age...