people

Humans of physics

Enormous scientific collaborations are made up of hundreds upon thousands of individuals, each with their own story. Online collections of profiles, such as Faces of DUNE, the Dark Energy Survey’s Scientist of the Week blog and Humans of LIGO, reveal the sometimes-ignored human sides of scientists.

From AAAS, Nov. 26, 2019: Fermilab scientist Vladimir Shiltsev has been elected a AAAS fellow. Fellows are elected each year by their peers serving on the Council of AAAS, the organization’s member-run governing body. The 2019 group will receive official certificates and rosette pins in gold and blue, colors symbolizing science and engineering, in a ceremony on Feb. 15, 2020, during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle.

From WTTW’s Chicago Tonight, Nov. 25, 2019: Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper spends his time contemplating the biggest mystery of all: how the universe came to be. In this 7-minute television segment, he outlines four big fundamental puzzles stumping cosmologists right now. He also explains these mysteries in his book “At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of our Universe’s First Seconds.”

From The Mac Observer, Nov. 25, 2019: In this 30-minute podcast episode, Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper recounts how he caught the astrophysics bug as an undergraduate, landed a postdoc position at Oxford and was later hired at Fermilab. He chats about his interest in the interface between particle physics and cosmology, dark matter and what neutrinos can tell us about the early universe.

From WDCB’s First Light, Nov. 17, 2019: It’s hard to imagine the number of experiments that have been conducted and the discoveries made at Fermilab over its more than 50-year history. Fermilab photographer Reidar Hahn, who had rare access to many of those tests and scientific advances for more than 30 years of the lab’s life, is preparing to step down. Hear what Hahn, Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer and Fermilab Art Gallery curator Georgia Schwender have to say about Hahn’s work in this 14-minute piece.