In other geeky science news...
The Chicago Tribune wrote:
The discovery that a bizarre particle travels between the real world of matter and the spooky realm of antimatter 3 trillion times a second may open the door to a new era of physics, Fermilab researchers announced Monday.
The incredibly rapid commuting rate of the B-sub-s meson particle had been predicted by the Standard Model, the successful but incomplete theory aimed at explaining how matter and energy interact to form the visible universe. After 20 years of trying, scientists have now confirmed the rate, providing strong evidence for the theory.
The monumentally precise technology developed to measure the meson's back and forth dashes also may open the way to discovering a new family of fundamental particles and possibly a set of new forces that could be harnessed for technological applications, physicists suggested.
[...]
For all that scientists have learned about the universe, it is still a mysterious place. Immediately after the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago, equal amounts of matter and antimatter formed. Much of it quickly acted to annihilate the other, but for little-understood reasons, a bit more matter than antimatter survived, providing the universe with the planets, stars and galaxies visible today.
Particles that bridge the worlds of matter and antimatter, such as the B-sub-s meson, normally don't exist on their own but can be created in the great collisions generated by particle accelerators, which attempt to duplicate conditions close to the Big Bang. Studying the particles helps scientists understand the evolution of the universe.
Fermilab's Tevatron collides protons against antiprotons moving near the speed of light, producing about 10 million collisions a second. The key to interpreting this enormous amount of data is a three-story-high instrument that measures the tracks of the particles exploding from the collisions.
Such experiments are big and expensive and require huge workforces. The meson experiment involves 700 physicists from 61 institutions and 13 countries.
Fermilab physicists are now more hopeful they may be able to find signs of even more elusive particles, such as the Higgs particle, which imbues matter with mass. Without the Higgs, it is theorized, matter would have no weight.
Remember back in school when they taught you that protons, neutrons and electrons were as small as it gets?
The rest of the
story centers around how the fate of Fermilab is in doubt unless they get the funding needed to stay competitive with European collider projects. Which would be a shame if they closed down because it's a pretty neat place to visit if you're into science although it's not really visually exciting given that the Tevatron is buried underground.