"I told her, 'I want to meet the smartest kids, the kids who are interested in building things, in physics, ' " he says.

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Then he switched to particle physics and worked on building and using particle detectors destined to figure out aspects of how quarks behave.

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Dr Andrew Taylor, the Director of Isis, says it achieved its world leading position by building upon the achievements of the accelerators developed for particle physics in the 1970s.

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Building on an idea floated earlier this year by theoretical physics guru and Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek of MIT, a team led by UC Berkeley researcher Tongcang Li has created a schematic for a crystal with a fourth dimension -- movement in time.

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The Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics will be housed at the university's James Clerk Maxwell Building.

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