Epstein Secrets

their craft. American physicists were not exactly sitting on the sidelines last July when CERN announced the probable discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson, the key to understanding the origin of mass and life in the universe. The United States contributed $531 million to building and equipping th

011 and wants to use some of it to host the next big machine, the International Linear Collider, which would be 20 miles long and could manufacture Higgs bosons for precision study. In February, in a ceremony at a physics conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, the team that had been designing the

87 After canceling the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have been the world's most powerful physics machine, in 1993, and shutting down Fermilab's Tevatron in 2011, the United States no longer owns the tool of choice in physics, a particle collider. Fermilab's biggest project going forward is

s would leave only the photon left over as a massless gauge boson. But there's more. By virtue of the gauge symmetry he introduced, Weinberg's new Higgs particle would also interact with electrons, and when the condensate formed, the effect would be to give electrons a mass as well as the W and Z pa

a revolutionary. But reluctant revolutionary he was, although, due to some shortsighted journal editors, he almost didn't get the chance. In 1960 Higgs had just taken up his post and had been asked to serve on the committee that coordinated the first Scottish Universities Summer School in Physics.

PS), had just been commissioned as a conventional fixed-target accelerator operating with a proton beam at goo GeV. However, another accelerator at Fermilab, near Chicago, had already achieved proton beams of soo GeV by the time the SPS turned on. In June of that year, physicists Carlo Rubbia, Peter McI

, author of Just Six Numbers "It is an exhilarating experience to be led through this fascinating story, from Galileo to the Standard Model and the Higgs boson and beyond, with lucid detail and insight, illuminating vividly not only the achieve- ments themselves but also the joy of creative thought an

b during the Manhattan Project. Many years later he was the first director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Il- linois. When Fermilab was being built, in 1969 Wilson was summoned before Congress to defend the expenditure of significant funds on this exotic new accelerator, which w