Word: cerned
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...future Nobels. Last week, even as this year's Nobel winners were reacting to their awards, two teams of physicists made just such a landmark announcement. In rival statements -- one from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, the other from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva -- scientists disclosed findings they say establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe contains precisely three fundamental types, or families, of matter. No more, no less...
...except that their charge is positive rather than negative. From the debris of the collisions, which involve particles traveling at nearly the speed of light, physicists hope to get information that will solidify -- or upset -- their understanding of the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy. Says Carlo Rubbia, CERN's director general: "This is the main road in basic science. You never know where the main road is really going to take you." Agrees Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, a Nobel prizewinner in theoretical physics: "Maybe we will discover some weird particle for which there...
...while the unexpected is always possible, CERN physicists do have a specific quarry to start with. As soon as the LEP has been put through its paces, they will begin taking a hard look at a particle called the Z 0, which will emerge in great numbers from the electron-positron collisions. The discovery of the Z 0 and two related particles, W+ and W-, in 1982 and 1983 won a Nobel for CERN scientists Rubbia and Simon van der Meer. The three particles carry the weak nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, which is responsible...
Many experts think that is unlikely. Richter bet on a new approach to accelerator design, sending the positrons and electrons down a two-mile-long straight track, then spinning them out in opposing semicircles before colliding them. The CERN machine is more conventional and thus more likely to work from the start. The positrons and electrons in the LEP are made to circle repeatedly in opposite directions through the tunnel, with new particles added periodically to the stream. In a given period of time, the LEP is expected to produce hundreds of times as many Z 0s as the Stanford...
...Although CERN's staff tries to be diplomatic about competition with the U.S. in particle physics, there is little doubt that the LEP has given the Europeans a major advantage. "I don't think of science as a football game," says Ugo Amaldi, who oversees one of the LEP's detectors. "But if you look at the number of American scientists coming here, it is clear that our way of doing things is attracting interest...