Physics Gallery

Portrait of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher

andlt;strongandgt;R.A. Fisher.andlt;/strongandgt; Portrait of the Englishstatistician and geneticist, Sir Ronald AylmerFisher (1890- 1962). Fisher graduated inmathematics and physics at Cambridge University in1912. He was appointed statistician at RothamstedExperimental Station, in charge of 66 years ofdata on agricultural field trials. Fisher'scontributions to statistics include methods ofexperimental design, work on human inheritance, and the genetics of the rhesus blood factor. Inandlt;emandgt;The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, andlt;/emandgt;he showed that Mendel's genetic laws and Darwin'stheory of natural selection are in full accord.Fisher became professor of genetics at Cambridgein 1943, and was knighted in 1952

© A.BARRINGTON BROWN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

End of magnet for Large Hadron Collider

Magnet for the Large Hadron Collider. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the new accelerator for CERN, the European particle physics laboratory at Geneva. This is an end-on view of one of the cylindrical bending magnets. A test cable is seen inserted into one of the twin beam pipes down which bunches of protons or heavy ions will be accelerated in opposite directions at very close to the speed of light. The beam pipes are encased in a cryostat jacket which will be cooled to 1. 8 degrees Kelvin using liquid helium. This allows superconducting wire to be used, making possible the very strong magnetic fields needed to bend the proton beams around the LHC's 27-km circumference

© DAVID PARKER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Prof. Peter Higgs

British theoretical physicist Professor Peter Higgs (b. 1929). In 1964, Higgs predicted the existence of a new type of fundamental particle, commonly called the Higgs boson. This particle is required by many of the current Grand Unified Theories (or GUTs) which hope to explain three of the fundamental forces (electromagnetism, the weak & the strong nuclear forces) in a single unified theory. The Higgs boson is yet to be detected experimentally. Higgs is professor of theoretical physics at Edinburgh University. This photograph was taken at his office in Edinburgh in 1988 and is composited with a simulated Higgs Event such as might be seen in the CMS detector of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory

© DAVID PARKER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY