Word: fermi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That tumultuous scene last week, reminiscent of a locker-room victory celebration, marked a more esoteric kind of triumph. When the green line made its telltale movement at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the sprawling high-energy physics research center outside Chicago, it signified a major scientific achievement. At that instant, Fermilab's newly rebuilt accelerator (physicists prefer that term to atom smasher) climbed to 512 billion electron volts (GeV),* the highest energy level ever reached by the powerful machines used by physicists to study the fundamental secrets of matter...
Electricity use in Michigan, for example, has dropped during the past three years as the auto industry has fallen on hard times. Critics now question the necessity of two reactors being built in Midland by Consumers Power and Detroit Edison's Fermi 2 plant nearing completion in Monroe County. Fermi 1, the first plant to sprout from Company Chairman Walker Cisler's vision, was problem plagued from its conception in the 1950s. It was shut down in 1972 after running only 300 days in six years...
Besides Glashow, who won a Nobel Prize for physics in 1978. Burton Richter, professor of physics at Stanford University and a Nobel Laureate in 1976, and Wolfgang Panofsky, the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, will be present at the conference, which is sponsored by the Fermi physics Laboratory of Chicago, as well as "much of the physics establishment of Moscow," Glashow said...
Even at that stage of Sagan's career, some of his professors detected rebelliousness in him, a penchant for shunning the work at hand in order to explore other interests. Recalls Physicist Peter Meyer, who is now director of Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute: "He told me he would rather spend time with problems in astronomy than go through the hardships of classical physics." Today Meyer concedes that it is precisely this restlessness of intellect that enables Sagan to see the broader picture, letting him point out, for example, where biology and chemistry converge with astronomy. Says another scientist: "Sagan...
Some physicists greeted Reines' findings with skepticism. Said Theorist Chris Quigg of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago: "It's a brute force, heroic effort rather than an elegant experiment with lots of internal checks." But none denied that if Reines' case can be confirmed, it will have wide-ranging implications...