From The Great Courses Daily, May 5, 2020: Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper writes about how Einstein’s failure in achieving a unified field theory didn’t stop the others. Physicists continue to search for a theory of everything that unites the effects of general relativity with the quantum mechanical nature of our world.
In the news
From Kane County Chronicle, May 6, 2020: A team of physicists and scientists from all over the world, including Fermilab researchers, have come together to design and create a simplified ventilator that recently receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
From Chicago Tribune, May 5, 2020: In the middle of a global health emergency, scientists at Fermilab found they had a lot to offer the effort to meet demand for ventilators to treat COVID-19 patients. Fermilab scientist Stephen Brice helps explain how the group, working with colleagues outside the U.S., designed a portable, low-cost ventilator that still is capable of the most precise functions that bulkier, costlier machines provide.
From Gizmodo, May 5, 2020: Fermilab scientist Brian Nord weighs in on the question of how automated devices, such as an autonomously operating telescope, free from human biases and complications, could find the solutions to questions about dark matter and dark energy.
From Gizmodo, May 4, 2020: Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment is featured in this piece on today’s biggest discoveries in physics, which come from huge collaborations of scientists working on enormous apparatuses.
From NCTV17, May 4, 2020: Fermilab’s Michael Pfaff is interviewed in this one-minute video segment about the newest addition to the Fermilab bison herd
From Argonne National Laboratory, May 5, 2020: Using Argonne’s supercomputer Mira, researchers have come up with newly precise calculations aimed at understanding a key gap between physics theory and measurements by the Muon g-2 experiment
From MVM collaboration, May 5, 2020: The Mechanical Ventilator Milano is an innovative ventilator, conceived and designed by an international collaboration of particle physicists and developed in cooperation with other relevant scientific communities. Its mechanical design is simple, using a small number of parts to facilitate rapid production. Fermilab scientists volunteered their time to design, test and finalize the MVM.
From Live Science, May 1, 2020: A group of researchers at Fermilab has worked with high-school teachers to develop a program to train their students in the emerging field of quantum computing.
From Live Science, April 29, 2020: One of the deepest mysteries in physics could be explained by a long-since vanished form of dark matter. Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper is one of the authors of the new result. If an ancient form of dark matter decayed out of existence, that loss would have decreased the mass of the universe, which would have led to less gravity holding the universe together, which would have affected the speed at which the universe expands — helping explain the disagreement between measurements of the universe’s expansion.