Yesterday the American astronaut and aquanaut Scott Carpenter, one of the first seven astronauts selected for the Mercury program, died. A short time ago he had a stroke from which he appeared to be recovering but in recent days his condition deteriorated up to his death. Born on May 1, 1925, Carpenter was an austronaut of the Mercury-Atlas 7 space mission and an aquanaut of the Sealab-II mission.
When last year two experiments at CERN, CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) and ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), announced the preliminary results of their research confirming the existence of the Higgs boson, everybody started expecting Peter Higgs to receive the Nobel Prize for physics. Today came the official announcement of the award to him and François Englert, the other physicist who in the ’60s published an independent work that led to very similar conclusions.
A few months after the death of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, his brother Dean gave an interview in which gives a new version of the origin of the famous phrase “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind”. The astronaut said he had improvised the phrase once arrived on the Moon but now his brother claims that he had asked him for an opinion about that phrase a few months before the Apollo 11 mission.
