Word: fermilab
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is not to say that the U.S. is second rate. The Tevatron, an accelerator at Fermilab, near Chicago, that smashes together protons and antiprotons, is still the most powerful collider in the world, and the proposed superconducting supercollider, planned for Texas, will be more powerful still. Proton-antiproton collisions entail more energy than electron- positron collisions and thus are more likely to generate previously undiscovered particles. But proton-antiproton impacts generate more subatomic debris, which makes it harder to study the properties of individual particles carefully. For what Amaldi calls "precision physics," Europe could soon...
...extremely concentrated energy bursts by using its magnets to guide protons, moving at nearly 186,000 miles per second, around the enormous ring in opposite directions. Then they would be forced to collide. The major difference between the SSC and the largest accelerator that currently exists -- the Tevatron, at Fermilab near Chicago -- is size and, therefore, power. The SSC would produce some 20 times as much energy as the Tevatron can and would generate correspondingly more interesting particles. Among the discoveries are certain to be some surprises. Says Harvard physicist Roy Schwitters, who is a leading candidate...
There's a famous story about Robert Wilson, the founder of Fermilab (where they do look for the grand and unified theory). Wilson was asked once by a penurious congressional committee if Fermilab contributed anything to the national defense. No, answered Wilson, it just helped make the country worth defending. So did the space program...
...escape from a black hole, have generally come to accept that discovery. And the stuff emitted from little black holes (and big ones too, but far more slowly) is now called Hawking radiation. "In general relativity and early cosmology, Hawking is the hero," says Rocky Kolb, a physicist at Fermilab in Illinois. Caltech Physicist Kip Thorne agrees: "I would rank him, besides Einstein, as the best in our field." And what if a mini-black hole explosion is finally observed? "I would get the Nobel Prize," says Stephen, matter-of-factly...
Leon Lederman, director of Fermilab, agrees. "Even if, miracle of miracles, in the next two years they solve all the problems of brittleness and high current," he says, "we would still need lots of experience to understand the materials well enough to make good magnets. A superconducting accelerator magnet is a Swiss watch of precision." One problem: superconducting magnetic fields are so strong they can actually deform the accelerator magnets that produce them. While physicists have learned to deal with that phenomenon at Fermilab, they have no idea how to handle fields that could be many times as strong...