Word: detector
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...escapee from a cosmic lunatic asylum" named Doomsday will murder the Man of Steel. The state of Pennsylvania touts itself as a place for "multiple personalities" to suggest it has much to offer tourists. A character on Roseanne argues that only "murderers, psychos and schizos" can beat a lie-detector test. On election eve, Ross Perot tells a cheering crowd, "We're all crazy again now! We got buses lined up outside to take you back to the insane asylum...
...Just as lie detector tests can't be used in the court of law, because of the uncertainty, we felt that similarly there was too much uncertainty in this information for them to use it," he says...
Finding the top is the sort of discovery of which Nobel dreams are made, and the pressure to be first has become particularly intense now that the Collider Detector has a competitor on its tail, a rival Fermilab detector that began generating its own data last May. The sense of urgency has intensified arguments among the Collider Detector's 400 experimentalists over how to interpret the whispery tracks that appeared in October inside the device, a conglomeration of electronics and steel that stands 3 1/2 stories tall and weighs 4,500 tons. Through its hollow center, protons and antiprotons, accelerated...
...particles into which a top and its antimatter twin should occasionally decay. Or did they? One clue was the detection of a muon, a close relative of the electron. At least, it appeared to be a muon. The reason scientists aren't sure is that the portion of the detector responsible for tracking muons is segmented like an orange. "And with the malice often displayed by inanimate objects," says University of Chicago physicist Henry Frisch with a sigh, "this muon went right up a crack between the segments...
...largest problem confronting the scientists is the sort of statistical error that bedevils political pollsters. For while physicists sometimes base discoveries on a single observation, more often they must rely on multiple events to build a case. Thus a second intriguing event, recorded by the Collider Detector in December, has come under especially intense scrutiny. The discovery of the top will no doubt emerge gradually, believes Peter Galison, a science historian at Harvard. "The expanding circle of belief," he says, "must start inside the experimental collaboration and then widen to include the whole physics community." How long this process will...