The History Of Physics Is Littered With Innumerable Sublime Discoveries -- All While "Looking For Something Else, Entirely..." Wobbly Muons Edition.

Seen once before -- in early 2001, by a grad student, out on Long Island. . . but then the funding ran out. Fast forward 13 years, that grad student (now PhD, doing post-doc work) has a full lab -- and new funding at Fermilab -- and a long slow boat ride for the huge electromagnet ring structure -- down the East Coast, around the tip of Florida. . . across the Gulf waters, to the mouth of the Mississippi. . . then up that river, to Illinois' central western edge. . . then on a huge flatbed trailer, astride three lanes, at 10 miles an hour. . . to an hour outside Chicago, and Fermi's Batavia campus. And, it all began. . . again.

Then after eight more years, of assembly, calibration, experimentation, data collection and ultimately wildly accelerating sub atomic particles, around the vast race-track imaged at right -- an astonishing first result. That is the journey to this moment. Here's a bit, from syfy.com's syfy wire(!):

. . .On our macroscopic scale, we like to think that space is smooth and continuous. But on a quantum scale, an incredibly tiny scale, quantum mechanics implies that space is not continuous and smooth, and instead may come in discrete units, like tick marks on a graph. This means, on that scale, space may not be empty, but instead boils and froths with energy.

Sometimes this energy will spontaneously create a pair of subatomic particles (because mass and energy are two sides of the same coin, E being equal to mc2 and all that). These particles can pop into existence, but these same laws of quantum reality demand that the particles immediately interact and become energy again, going back into the vacuum energy. This is called (and I love this) the quantum foam. . . .

These extremely interesting and possibly game-changing results come from Fermilab, a high-energy particle accelerator laboratory in Illinois. They do a lot of different types of experiments there, and one is called Muon g-2 (literally, "g minus 2"), which examines a subatomic particle called a muon.

Muons are similar to electrons — they have a negative charge, for example, and the same spin (a fundamental property of particles, which will become important in a moment), though they're 200 times more massive. . . .

Grinning, ear to ear -- into the undiscovered country. . . once more.

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