From the February 2008 Scientific American Magazine | 7 comments

The Future of Physics ( Preview )

The Editors' introduction to the physics Special Report

By The Editors

More from the Magazine

February
2008 Issue
Sustainable Developments Crisis in the Drylands
Letters to the Editors Letters
News Scan Proactive Prototypes
Buy the Digital Edition

They call it the terascale. It is the realm of physics that comes into view when two elementary particles smash together with a combined energy of around a trillion electron volts, or one tera-electron-volt. The machine that will take us to the terascale—the ring-shaped Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN—is now nearing completion.

To ascend through the energy scales from electron volts to the terascale is to travel from the familiar world through a series of distinct landscapes: from the domains of chemistry and solid-state electronics (electron volts) to nuclear reactions (millions of electron volts) to the territory that particle physicists have been investigating for the past half a century (billions of electron volts)..

Already a Digital subscriber? Sign-in Now
If your institution has site license access, enter here.

Read Comments (7) | Post a comment

You Might Also Like

Discuss This Article

Click here to submit your comment.

VIEW:



	Email:
	Name:
	Address:
	Address 2:
	City:
	State:

Subscription Center

Editor's Pick

Adapting to the Freshwater CrisisForward-thinking experts are getting a better handle on the growing global water shortage and coming up with innovative approaches to ensuring the security, safety and sustainability of this resource