Magazine
March-April 2012
March-April 2012
Volume: 100 Number: 2
A man in a hard hat gives some scale to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector, one of two detectors on the Large Hadron Collider, the largest scientific instrument in the world. It's part of the massive European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory based underground outside Geneva, Switzerland. The CMS detector is built around a solenoid magnet that generates a magnetic field of 4 teslas, close to 100,000 times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. Scientists use the device to accelerate and collide subatomic particles to try to detect building blocks of our universe. Among the elusive targets are the Higgs boson particle, potential extra dimensions, even dark matter, features theorists expect are there but we have not yet seen. As Jeremy Bernstein explains in "A Palette of Particles," evidence of enigmatic atomic components has propelled the work of physicists for more than a century. (Photograph by Mark Thiessen for National Geographic Society/Corbis.)
In This Issue
- Agriculture
- Art
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Communications
- Computer
- Engineering
- Environment
- Evolution
- Physics
- Policy
- Psychology
- Sociology
- Technology
When Scientists Choose Motherhood
Wendy M. Williams, Stephen J. Ceci
Anthropology Sociology
One factor explains much of the dearth of women in math-based fields
A Palette of Particles
Jeremy Bernstein
Physics
Some elementary particles arrived like unexpected and, sometimes, unwanted guests
