The ICARUS detector will soon start a second life seeking perhaps the strangest particles physicists have dreamed up, oddballs called sterile neutrinos.
It all started with a swimming hole. In 1988, Maggie Keswick, the wife of noted architect and designer Charles Jencks, had a swamp dug up on her familys Scottish estate to create a place for their children to swim.
Mark Hanhardt spent his childhood exploring caverns and watching his dad, who was a miner, come home from work covered in dust. Still, he had no interest in working underground.
For most scientists, membership in a Large Hadron Collider experiment is a ticket to research at a frontier of particle physics. For Hafeez Hoorani, it also marked his country’s first step toward building a tradition of experimental particle physics research.
Who would you drive 10½ hours to see? The Grateful Dead? The Dalai Lama? What about an old, friendly guy who reads a lot and is really good at physics?