Skip to content

Don Lincoln

Dr. Don Lincoln is a Senior Scientist at Fermilab, America’s leading particle physics laboratory, who has coauthored over 1,500 scientific papers. He was a member of the teams that discovered the top quark in 1995 and the Higgs boson in 2012.

Dr. Lincoln is also an avid popularizer of science. He has written several books for the public, most recently Einstein’s Unfinished Dream. He also writes for many online venues, such as CNN and Scientific American. He appears frequently on the Fermilab YouTube channel and has made several video courses available through The Great Courses company.

Dr. Lincoln is a recipient of the 2013 Outreach Prize from the European Physical Society and the 2017 Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

You can learn more about Dr. Lincoln on his home page, and you can follow him on Facebook.

Looking northwards in the Isle of Skye Scotland

Surprising Discovery Challenges Key Principle of Modern Cosmology

Observations of an enormous cosmic structure, dubbed the "Big Ring," seem to violate the Copernican principle.
An illustration of Spaghettification from NASA's Imagine the Universe!

“Spaghettification”: How Black Holes Stretch Objects into Oblivion

Want to avoid getting “spaghettified” by a black hole? Steer clear of the smaller ones.
A deep image from the Dark Energy Survey showing the field covered by one of the individual detectors in the Dark Energy Camera.

Astronomers Use AI to Shed Light on Dark Energy

A new measurement offers insights on the density of the mysterious force driving the Universe’s expansion.
An artist's rendering of a black hole

Ancient Black Hole Challenges Our Understanding of the Early Universe

The Big Bang theory is not threatened, but astrophysicists have some explaining to do.
International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/B. O'Connor (UMD/GWU) & J. Rastinejad & W Fong (Northwestern Univ) Image processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller, M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

Explaining GRB 221009A, the Greatest Cosmic Explosion Humanity Has Ever Seen

The brightest gamma-ray burst ever observed, GRB 221009A behaved in unexpected ways that might help us understand how they occur.
The IceCube Laboratory just before South Pole Dawn

“Ghostly” Neutrinos Help Us See Our Milky Way as Never Before

As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery...consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
An illustration of Star Trek's USS Enterprise in warp drive

Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible?

The concept of the warp drive is currently at odds with everything we know to be true about physics.
Animation of Black Hole Disk Flare in OJ 287

Solved: Astronomers Identify Origin of Mysterious Flares in Galaxy OJ 287

In a distant galaxy, a cosmic dance between two supermassive black holes emits periodic flashes of light.