A decorated vacuum chamber of the Coherent X-ray Instrument at SLAC. Plenty of little personal touches cover its walls and instruments, but few so well-disguised as this one.
Relax, you're in the loving arms of physics.
A Vanderbilt physicist has both good and bad news.
Apparently people just have better things to do than win the world's most prestigious prize.
For the first time, physicists have directly measured the temperature of extremely hot gold particles using a giant X-ray laser—a breakthrough with major implications for engineering spacecraft or nuclear fusion reactors.
Scientists have discovered that under the right conditions, a gummy bear-like ball can roll down a vertical wall all by itself—upending a core assumption in physics.
Turns out, conventional wisdom on the matter appears to be wrong.
