Word: physicist
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...photon puzzle was nothing more than a matter of speculation until 1964, when an Irish theoretical physicist named John Stewart Bell restated the problem as a simple mathematical proposition. A young physicist named John Clauser came upon Bell's theorem and realized that it opened the door to testing the two-photon problem in an experiment. Like Einstein, Clauser was bothered by the seemingly absurd implications of quantum mechanics. Says Clauser, now a research physicist at the University of California, Berkeley: "I had an opportunity to devise a test and see whether nature would choose quantum mechanics or reality...
...outcome was clear: a change in one photon did alter the polarization of the other. In other words, nature chose quantum mechanics, showing that the two related photons could not be considered separate objects, but rather remained connected in some mysterious way. This experiment, argues physicist Henry Stapp of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, imposes new limits on what can be established about the nature of matter by proving that experiments can be influenced by events elsewhere in the universe...
...international competition has spurred remarkable progress in the effort to understand nature's mysteries. Says theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin: "Before, we had a zoo of particles, but no one knew why they were the way they were. Now we have a simple picture." That picture, known as the Standard Model, is based on a set of theories that attempt to describe the nature of matter and energy as simply as possible. The model holds that nearly all the matter we know of, from garter snakes to galaxies, is composed of just four particles...
...researchers will be awfully disappointed if all they succeed in doing is to fill out the known family tree of particles. Too much predictability can make science dull. Says Samuel Ting, an M.I.T. physicist and one of the head researchers at CERN: "I will only consider our experiment a success if we discover something really surprising -- new types of quarks, for example -- that would explode the standard theory...
...doubt plenty of frontiers left for CERN to push back. Though LEP does not appear to be powerful enough to find the top quark, the "clean" electron-positron collisions could reveal many other exotic phenomena. One long shot is the much-sought Higgs boson, named for British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, one of the first to recognize its importance. According to some theories, the Higgs boson is what gives all particles their mass. The idea is that everything in the universe is awash in a seaof Higgs bosons, and particles acquire their mass by swimming through this "molasses...