It’s good to blog
It all started a year ago over dinner with a good bottle of wine in front of us. Steve Gourlay of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stuart Henderson of Fermilab and myself talked about the future...
Authors and supporters
The first “high-energy” accelerators were constructed more than 80 years ago. No doubt they represented technological challenges and major achievements even though, seen from a 2012 p...
Towards a more confident future
Gloom and despondency about the economic climate fill the newspapers to saturation point. The eurozone is, once again, destined to fragment and disappear – there is a depressingly strong sensati...
Trends in isotope discovery
It all started innocently enough with a review article I wrote in 2004 about the nuclear driplines, which described the exploration of the most neutron- and proton-rich isotopes (Thoennessen 2004). Th...
Accelerator-driven systems for nuclear energy
Some years after Ernest Rutherford invented nuclear physics, he expressed a wish for “a copious supply of atoms and electrons which have an individual energy far transcending that of the α ...
From the Tevatron to Project X
The end of September marks the end of an era at Fermilab, with the shut down of the Tevatron after 28 years of operation at the frontiers of particle physics (CERN Courier March 2011 p5). The Tev...
CERN and the EPS: a joint endeavour
The European Physical Society (EPS) was founded at CERN in 1968. Today it represents more than 100,000 physicists through its 41 national member societies and it provides a scientific forum ...
Optimizing potential
At the end of January, a small fraction of CERN decamped to Chamonix along with experts from around the world – not to ski but to work out the plans for the coming year’s LHC run. It is a ...
Collide – a cultural revolution
Would you employ me to run the LHC? Or perhaps to run an experiment at CERN with antimatter? After all, I have an abiding interest in physics – ever since an inspiring science teacher sparked my...
CERN – the knowledge hub
If you ask 10 people working at CERN how they would describe what CERN is in a single sentence, the chances are that you will get 10 different answers. Most people think of CERN, first and f...