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Scientists have long suspected that top quarks are routinely produced by the powerful collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. So far, however, a thicket of more ordinary particles has concealed them from view. But the top may not elude discovery much longer. In late October, researchers at Fermilab's Collider Detector found a provocative set of tracks hinting that a top may have briefly materialized, then vanished like a Halloween ghost. The tantalizing event was reported at a conference held at the facility in mid-November. Since then, physicists have talked of little else...
Theorists have already deduced that the top quark is heavier than any known particle. "A single top quark," exclaims Fermilab physicist Alvin Tollestrup, "probably weighs at least as much as a whole silver atom does." (With an atomic weight of 108, a silver atom is made up of hundreds of up and down quarks.) Exactly how much top quarks weigh is a question scientists are anxious to answer, but first they must find some to measure -- a task considerably complicated by the fact that in nature these massive but ethereal entities made only a cameo appearance, just after...
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...
Lederman, former head of Fermilab, the high-energy physics center in Illinois, had conducted a survey of research scientists in 50 universities. Most of the nearly 250 responses, he reported, came from demoralized and underfunded researchers who foresaw only a bleak future for their disciplines and their jobs. "I haven't seen anything like this in my 40 years in science," Lederman said. "Research, at least the research carried out in universities, is in very serious trouble." And that, he warned, "raises serious questions about the very future of science...
...physicists from a number of weapons laboratories and Southeastern universities, which until now have not been powers in the field of particle physics. Observers expect he will run the experiment in the strictly hierarchical fashion he has displayed at CERN. At the same time, physicists from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Fermilab, Argonne National Laboratory and Japan are drawing up a collaboration that will be run along the more democratic lines of Fermilab. The clash of cultures between the CERN and Fermilab styles of management may make the sociology of the SSC nearly as interesting as the science...