Symmetry

In a brightly lit clean room at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, engineers are building a car-sized digital camera for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. When it’s ready, LSST will image almost all of the sky visible from its vantage point on a Chilean mountain, Cerro Pachón, every few nights for a decade to make an astronomical movie of unprecedented proportions. Building the LSST means solving extraordinary technological challenges.

Konstantinos Iakovidis was training in Greece’s Hellenic Army in May 2008 when his younger brother, George, was accepted into the CERN summer student program. When George told Konstantinos he had been invited to move to Switzerland for two months, he cried — and encouraged him to take the opportunity. Little did Konstantinos know that six years later, he would make his own journey to CERN and would eventually join his physicist brother on the same project, as a mechanical engineer.

Four physicists share their journeys through academia into industry and offer words of wisdom for those considering making a similar move.

Physicists meet this week in Granada, Spain, to update the European Strategy for Particle Physics. Hundreds of scientists from around the globe associated with the European particle physics program are meeting ti discuss and evaluate what Europe’s next collaborative projects should be. The end goal is a consolidated strategy that European research institutions can use to guide their efforts for the next several years.

In their quest to discover physics beyond the Standard Model, physicists weigh the pros and cons of different search strategies.

By developing clever theories and conducting experiments with particle colliders, telescopes and satellites, physicists have been able to wind the film of the universe back billions of years—and glimpse the details of the very first moments in the history of our cosmic home. Take a (brief) journey through the early history of our cosmos.

It’s not always about what you discover. The LHC research program is famous for discovering and studying the long-sought Higgs boson. But out of the spotlight, scientists have been using the LHC for an equally important scientific endeavor: testing, constraining and eliminating hundreds of theories that propose solutions to outstanding problems in physics, such as why the force of gravity is so much weaker than other known forces like electromagnetism.

Physics professor Jason Nordhaus is working to reduce barriers to STEM for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, who face numerous barriers when trying to study technical STEM fields like physics. Physicists like Nordhaus are trying to change all that with specialized programs, classes and interpreter training, all aimed at reducing barriers in STEM.

Building a particle physics laboratory requires more than physicists. Fermilab archivist Valerie Higgins has authored a paper available in the online physics repository arXiv, and earlier this month she published an op-ed for Physics World on the importance of capturing perspectives from all parts of the laboratory. She sat down with Symmetry writer Lauren Biron to discuss her thoughts.

Can a theory that isn’t completely testable still be useful to physics? What determines if an idea is legitimately scientific or not? This question has been debated by philosophers and historians of science, working scientists, and lawyers in courts of law. That’s because it’s not merely an abstract notion: What makes something scientific or not determines if it should be taught in classrooms or supported by government grant money.