Word: physicists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Proponents hail this remote corner of New Mexico as an ideal location for a spaceport: the weather is dry and clear year round, and at 4,500 ft. above sea level, jokes Steve Landeene, the spaceport's executive director, "the first mile is free." Physicist Robert Goddard developed modern rocketry here in the 1930s; in 1947, a mysterious object crashed to earth outside Roswell, making the town synonymous with UFO conspiracy theories. Thanks to the restricted airspace over the neighboring White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Air Force Base, there's also hardly any commercial air traffic. (Watch an interview...
Still, fourth ain't half bad at all, especially out of an applicant pool of 4,800 and a group of ten editor-selected finalists, which included Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter, former assistant secretary of commerce Darryl Jackson, and Council on Foreign Relations expert Lydia Khalil...
...mile underground ring designed to smash atoms together at high energies, was created in part to find proof of a hypothetical subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. According to current theory, the Higgs is responsible for imparting mass to all things in the universe. But ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the particle in 1964, attempts to capture the particle have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons...
Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory represents one side of an intellectual divide between particle physicists today. Contemporary physicists tend to fall into one of two camps: the theorists, who posit ideas about the origins and workings of the universe; and experimentalists, who design telescopes and particle accelerators to test these theories, or provide new data from which novel theories can emerge. Most experimentalists believe that the theorists, due to a lack of new data in recent years, have reached a roadblock - the Standard Model, which is the closest thing the theorists have to an evidence-backed "theory of everything," provides...
...needs further proof that the Higgs boson is not abhorrent to nature, he need only spend time with his friend and mentor. "If nature truly did not want us to discover the Higgs, a cosmic ray would have zapped the embryo that became Peter, preventing its development into a physicist," he says...