Dan Falk, contributor


When science was young, the experiments were simple and the breakthroughs came easily - or so it seems in hindsight. Think of Galileo rolling a ball down an inclined plane, or aiming a simple tube, with a lens at each end, at the night sky. Or picture Michael Faraday discovering electromagnetic induction just by tinkering with a battery, an iron ring and some coils of wire.


Times have changed, and these days it takes a lot more work to shift a paradigm. For one thing, ground-breaking discoveries in physics are now typically made by teams rather than individuals. And, as we strive to peer more deeply into space or further inwards to probe the make-up of matter, we have been forced to build larger and more complex instruments. The scale of experiments has grown from table-top-sized to building-sized - even city-sized. Moreover, these experiments are often located in some of the remotest places on Earth. From these isolated outposts, men and women work under harsh conditions to collect the data that will, perhaps, change the way we conceive of the universe.