Sometimes it takes the most impressive equipment in the world to find the smallest, most easily overlooked particles in the universe. Fermilab's Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) project is a perfect example.
During a recent trip to CERN on the Franco-Swiss border, my fellow International Linear Collider communicators and I gathered in the cafeteria for tea and coffee.
Here they measure the time not in minutes or hours. Instead they think in terms of how many antiprotons are ready to stack and how soon the Tevatron will be ready to accept new beam. Or how fast they need to fix something, any time of the day or night. Or how long they can stay awake.
Roger Erickson was annoyed with all the calls to the main control room. People were eager for news of the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC). Was it running? Did they already observe the first Z particle, one of the carriers of the weak force?
Scientists since the time of Sir Isaac Newton (and before) have built their work on the work of those who preceded them. Newton famously described this by saying, “If I have been able to see farther, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”
