Fear of 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.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider work reminds us that no matter how well we think we understand the universe, nature can still throw us a curveball.

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.

The idea that galaxies were clusters of stars, gas, and dust had only been confirmed in the 1920s, but by 1933, Fritz Zwicky was convinced that was not the whole story.

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.

Generally, when scientists are comfortable with an existing paradigm they do not actively seek to disprove it. High energy physics is eager for a paradigm shift that seems to be just beyond our grasp. Only time—and more experiments—will tell if it will come to pass. If there is progress to be made, we’re going to make it.

Columnist Elizabeth Wade mourns the destruction of the cyclotron, Columbia’s nuclear relic buried below Pupin.

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

An apple probably never fell on Isaac Newton’s head, but if one had he certainly would have deserved it.

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.