Word: cern
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hundreds of feet beneath the ground outside the Swiss town of Meyrin, near Geneva, a six-year, $660 million construction project is rushing toward a payoff. Workers at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) have excavated a 12-ft.-wide circular tunnel that is 16 miles in circumference, installed nearly 5,000 powerful electromagnets, and put along the ring four massive detectors, each weighing several tons but sensitive to the passage of a single subatomic particle. This week, if all goes according to plan, technicians will begin test runs of the largest scientific instrument in the world...
...except that their charge is positive rather than negative. From the debris of the collisions, which involve particles traveling at nearly the speed of light, physicists hope to get information that will solidify -- or upset -- their understanding of the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy. Says Carlo Rubbia, CERN's director general: "This is the main road in basic science. You never know where the main road is really going to take you." Agrees Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, a Nobel prizewinner in theoretical physics: "Maybe we will discover some weird particle for which there...
...commuted between CERN and the Bohr Institute--or between Maria, the gorgeous blonde daughter of a German bassoonist, and Bonnie, my dark Danish damsel...
Long a dream of the American particle-physics community, an accelerator the size of the proposed SSC would be 20 times as powerful as any now existing. It would dwarf the major U.S. accelerators -- Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., and another at Stanford University -- and would surpass even Europe's CERN collider, near Geneva. Formally endorsed by Ronald Reagan last January, the project is what Energy Secretary John Herrington calls a "momentous leap forward" in the exploration of matter and energy...
...write his book, Taubes, a science writer forDiscover magazine, travelled to Geneva, whereRubbia was working in his laboratory at theEuropean Center for Nuclear Research (CERN...