Mike Perricone

Contributing Writer
Mike Perricone - Mike Perricone
Mike Perricone - Mike Perricone

For nearly a decade, I served as Senior Editor and science writer in the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Fermilab is home to the Tevatron, the world’s highest-energy particle collider until the Large Hadron Collider began operations at CERN in Switzerland. I wrote about particle physics and physicists almost daily, in print and on the web. Fermilab’s original twice-monthly publication, FermiNews, was succeeded in 2004 by “symmetry magazine,” published jointly with Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California.

FermiNews, which I edited for more than five years, won a 2002 Silver Trumpet Award from the Publicity Club of Chicago for its “significant contribution to public communication.” “symmetry” brought home a Golden Trumpet Award in 2006 from the PCC. As Executive Editor, I helped design and launch “symmetry” and wrote for it regularly. Along the way, I interviewed many renowned physicists, including Nobel Laureates Leon Lederman and James Cronin. And I’ve spoken with the winners of other prestigious physics and astrophysics prizes, such as Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Perlmutter led the Supernova Cosmology Project, which discovered evidence in 1998 for the accelerating expansion of the Universe (along with Australia’s High-Z Supernova Search team).

Since taking an early retirement from Fermilab, I have written several articles for the website Foundational Questions in Physics and Cosmology and recently completed a book for younger readers on The Big Bang. Writing about science is the culmination of a career of more than 35 years in journalism, including 12 years as a sportswriter at The Chicago Sun-Times. I covered professional hockey at The Sun-Times, so my career has taken me from hockey pucks to particle physics – and beyond, with my contributions to Suite 101.

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Latest Articles

Fermilab Discovers A Critical Quirk in the Early Universe
A big discrepancy between the decay behavior of matter and antimatter brings scientists closer to a clear view of why the universe is what it is.
May 19, 2010 - Mike Perricone
New Battery Ideas Are As Thin As Paper And Spread Like A Virus
Researchers at two leading U.S. universities have developed new battery technologies that could help change the way hybrid and electric vehicles are built.
Apr 7, 2010 - Mike Perricone
Media Presenting Low-Down Coverage on Depression
The New York Times, Newsweek and The New Yorker present a startling mix of poor reporting, dubious logic and questionable science.
Mar 24, 2010 - Mike Perricone
Making Toast, By Roger Rosenblatt
The stunning death of their daughter leads Roger and Mimi Rosenblatt on a journey to create a new family structure.
Mar 21, 2010 - Mike Perricone
Autobiography of an Execution, by David R. Dow
Depending on his family as the pillars of his life, a Texas death-penalty lawyer struggles to maintain hope when almost every day ends in defeat.
Mar 10, 2010 - Mike Perricone
Losing The News, by Alex S. Jones
WANTED: New ideas to maintain journalistic and economic viability of U.S. newspapers. Contact New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and local newspapers.
Mar 4, 2010 - Mike Perricone
Collider, by Paul Halpern
Despite its historic leadership in the field, the U.S. is handing over the top spot in the exotic realm of particle physics to a massive new machine Europe.
Feb 6, 2010 - Mike Perricone
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, by Chad Orzel
A physics professor teams up with his precocious floppy-eared shepherd mix, Emmy, to collar the quantum concepts that even Einstein found difficult to accept.
Jan 26, 2010 - Mike Perricone
Dark Cosmos, by Dan Hooper
An astrophysicist leads an exploration of just about everything you'll need to know to understand the coming discoveries about the dark side of the universe.
Dec 22, 2009 - Mike Perricone
The Joe Leaphorn Mysteries, by Tony Hillerman
Murder and mayhem join with ghosts and witchcraft to challenge Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police across immense, arid Reservation land in the American Southwest.
Dec 15, 2009 - Mike Perricone