physics

There is beauty in learning how to look at the world in a different way, which is what we are told will happen to us in college. Unlike some of the seniors graduating in a few weeks, I did not have a political awakening, undergo a religious conversion, or reinvent myself at Barnard—but I started “seeing” particles and waves in every beam of light, and even dark matter and dark energy. Once I learned about them, there was no going back.

High energy physics might destroy the world. Or at least that’s the claim that has recently garnered a lot of press for the Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator poised to start running in Switzerland this year.

Physics has not quite figured out how to include people who cannot, or simply do not want to, make the sacrifices a career in the science currently demands. Being a physicist is not a job. It’s a lifestyle. Those hindered most by the notion that physics must be all-consuming are women.

When Georges LeMaitre first proposed the Big Bang theory in 1927, everyone thought he was crazy.

Alpha particles aren’t usually greeted with a round of applause, but my physics class just couldn’t contain itself after we saw them for the first time.

The first things you notice at Fermilab are the buffalo. After building the world’s most powerful particle accelerator underground, the physics lab decided to turn the land above it into a prairie preserve populated by a herd of American bison.

Oct. 4 marks the best holiday you will never celebrate: the National Day of Shame. Congress proposed the holiday to commemorate the 1957 launch of Sputnik and the U.S.’s loss in the Space Race against the USSR.

In high school, only the moody, introspective, and (back then) way un-cool were interested in dating me. But ever since they were dubbed emo and Conor Oberst made “scrawny nerd” the new “outgoing quarterback,” those boys left me in the dust. So I have turned to the one group that has pretty much no chance of making the leap to trendy—scientists. More accurately, physicists.