The enigmatic neutrinos are among the most abundant of the tiny particles that make up our universe. They are a billion times more abundant than the particles of which the earth and we humans are made. Thus, to understand the...
A irreverent non-technical review of the history of surprisingly animate machines, from ancient Egypt to current times. Areas include teleoperators for hazardous environments, assembly systems, medical applications, entertainment, and science fiction. The talk has over 100 slides, covering such varied...
SLAC has converted its giant particle accelerator into the world's first X-ray laser. By a billion fold the world's brightest X-ray source, the laser packs a trillion photons into pulses as short as a millionth of a billionth of a...
As electronics become faster and more powerful and the components of integrated circuits shrink, scientists are bumping up against the limitations imposed by fundamental physics, forcing them to invent new technologies. Today computer hard drives store information in tiny magnets...
Particle physicists have a description of the forces of nature known as the Standard Model that has successfully withstood decades of testing at laboratories around the world. Though the Standard Model is powerful, it is not complete. Important details like...
One of the greatest challenges humanity faces is finding a way to provide the world's population with clean energy. Since sunlight is our most abundant source of energy, solar cells, which absorb sunlight and create electricity, will become increasingly important...
In this public lecture, longtime SLAC physicist Greg Loew will present a trip through SLAC's origins, highlighting its scientific achievements, and provide a glimpse of the lab's future in "Big Machines and Big Science: 80 Years of Accelerators at Stanford."
Black holes do not spend their lives alone in empty space. It is now known that at the center of almost every galaxy there is an enormous black hole, with a mass billions of times the mass of the sun...
Some 150 million years ago, a strange creature died in a tropical lagoon that today is located in Bavaria, Germany. In 1861, a single feather of this creature was discovered. Not long afterward, a complete fossil was found with the...
Astronomers infer that the universe contains huge amounts of a mysterious, invisible substance called "dark matter". To account for the structure of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, the universe must contain six times more dark matter than ordinary atomic matter...
At a first glance, our galaxy appears to be made of stars separated by vast and empty space. However, we now know that this space is filled with things that are more difficult to see – gas, photons and the...
What was the first thing in the Universe? A black hole or a star? How did it form? Even our biggest and best telescopes cannot tell us. Direct calculation with supercomputers, however, can. The first luminous objects in the Universe...
