Michael Riordan

The Moses of Silicon Valley

Forty years ago the southern part of the San Francisco Bay area was predominantly an agricultural valley filled with apricot orchards. Today this region is the bustling high‐technology capital of the world—envied by governments around the globe for its creativity and productivity. How did this remarkable technological transformation occur? And why is Silicon Valley located southeast of San Francisco rather than in, say, northern New Jersey, the Boston area or near Dallas?

A bridge too far: The demise of the Superconducting Super Collider

The largest basic scientific project ever attempted, the supercollider proved to be beyond the management capacity of the US high-energy physics community. A smaller proton collider would have been substantially more achievable.

The long road to the Higgs boson

With the discovery of the Higgs boson seemingly accomplished, Michael Riordan looks back at how this long-sought particle was predicted and the first quarter century of experimental searches for it.

Cornering the Higgs boson

Michael Riordan continues his look back on the Higgs boson search with the early attempts to hunt it down at the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider.

Ending the great drought

With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) springing to life at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, the great data drought in elementary particle physics is finally about to end. Not since the second phase of CERNs Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) began operations in 1996 has the field been able to probe virgin territory and measure truly new and exotic phenomena. And that machine merely doubled the energy reach of electron–positron colliders into regions that had already been partially explored using the Tevatron at Fermilab in the US. Researchers at these colliders – the worlds most powerful for over a decade – could only chip away at the outer fringes of the unknown. But the LHC, built by installing thousands of superconducting magnets in the LEP tunnel, will permit physicists to strike deep into its dark heart. There they will almost certainly discover something distinctively different.