By Hamish Johnston at the APS April Meeting in Salt Lake City

This morning Mei Bai of the Jülich Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany used a lovely phrase during her talk at the APS April Meeting. She showed a slide called the “accelerator tree”‘, which refers to a paper by Ugo Amaldi called “The importance of particle accelerators“.

Amaldi, who is at the University of Milan in Italy, has drawn a “time tree” that illustrates how accelerator technologies have grown from the seed sown by Ernest Lawrence in the 1920s. Branches that have emerged as the tree has grown include medical therapy and isotope analysis.

The paper is 16 years old and updating the tree would be a nice project for someone with an interest in creating infographics. Any takers?