Word: fermilab
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...record, to be sure, was only a minor increase over Fermilab's existing capability. In 1976, five years after its completion, the accelerator hit 500 GeV and has been operating close to that level ever since. But the jubilant scientists nonetheless had reason to celebrate. The test meant that years of work had finally paid off and that the $130 million set aside to make the machine the most complex accelerator ever built had really been well spent. In the months ahead, it will gradually be boosted to 800 GeV and perhaps by next year to a trillion electron...
Even rival American physicists were impressed. At Fermilab, the big U.S. accelerator center outside Chicago, Chris Quigg whimsically conceded, "They walk like Ws and talk like Ws." Rubbia was both ebullient and philosophical. Noting that scientists have been chopping matter into ever finer pieces since the time of the Greeks, he said, "We may not yet be at the end of the ladder...