Fundamental physics and the instruments that test it: clocks, colliders, quantum systems and the anomalies that refuse to go away.
4 stories. Section line: Hydrogen-beta, 486.1 nm.
Everyone in India is moving at well over 1,000 km/h without feeling a thing. We calculated the speed for each city, then added Earth’s orbit, the Sun’s path around the galaxy, and what all that does to your weight.
The best optical clocks would drift by less than a second over the age of the universe. They can see gravity change the flow of time across a millimeter, and the second itself is due to be redefined around them.
For twenty years, a tiny wobble in the muon’s magnetism looked like a crack in the Standard Model. The final measurement is in, and the crack seems to have closed. The real puzzle turned out to be in the theory.
For three decades, particle physics ran on photographs: millions of images of bubble trails in superheated liquid, measured by hand. The bubble chamber shaped what physicists found, and who did the finding.