The most powerful particle smasher in the world is apparently about to blow up under Melissa Franklin’s feet, and she’s having a hard time hiding her irritation. Minutes earlier Franklin waved good-bye to a team of eager students who were about to make their way down on a minor repair mission into the pit, the part of the Fermilab Tevatron accelerator where protons and antiprotons smash into one another with enough ferocity to create weird forms of matter and energy. But something went wrong down there. Now every type of siren, Klaxon, and flashing light ever invented is operating with bone-shaking enthusiasm throughout the accelerator building. The message is clear: the students in the pit have already been reduced to fundamental particles by terrible forces, and the rest of us are about to die.
Or maybe not. Franklin rolls her eyes and strolls morosely along the cat-walk toward the exit. I bet it was a walkie-talkie that set it off, she grumbles when she’s far enough outside to be heard over the hellish tumult inside. It seems that the countless monitoring devices scattered throughout the accelerator are set to better-safe-than-sorry levels and don’t always effectively discriminate between meltdown death rays and radio messages like Wow, look at all these pipes. Such false alarms occur every three weeks or so, causing most of the people who work here to lose most of a day’s work. Everyone’s used to it. Jorge, one of the students who descended into the pit, comes strolling up, his grin still in place. Did you do that? asks Franklin accusingly, but only in a mock way. Probably, says Jorge, shrugging breezily.
&amp;amp;amp;lt;A HREF="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/site125.tmus/physics_math;ptile=1;sz=300x250;ord=300456789?" TARGET="_blank"&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;IMG SRC="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/site125.tmus/physics_math;ptile=1;sz=300x250;ord=300456789?" WIDTH="300" HEIGHT="250" BORDER="0" ALT=""&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/A&amp;amp;amp;gt; Some 50 people are now standing around outside the accelerator building, joking, chatting with the newly arrived firefighters in neon green insulated suits. They are a sampling of the 850 scientists from various research institutes around the world who have dedicated a chunk of their lives to tracking down a particle known as the top quark. The search, being conducted by two relatively independent groups working in parallel, is in a sort of protracted limbo right now; the top quark hasn’t officially been discovered, but it’s not exactly missing anymore, either. One of the two groups has put together a pretty good case that the top quark has actually turned up a few times in the pit, but its case isn’t ironclad. Now it’s trying to gather the extra evidence it needs to claim unconditional discovery. <A HREF="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/site125.tmus/physics_math;ptile=1;sz=300x250;ord=300456789?" TARGET="_blank"><IMG SRC="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/site125.tmus/physics_math;ptile=1;sz=300x250;ord=300456789?" WIDTH="300" HEIGHT="250" BORDER="0" ALT=""></A> Franklin is one of the many key players in the effort, heading the small Harvard contingent that built and maintains two of the particle detectors in the pit. She has flown here to Batavia, outside Chicago, for a three-or-so-day visit to check on the experiment and her students, as she has done as frequently as every other week for the past ten years. But between the need for some minor repairs and the walkie-talkie incident, it’s clear that nothing much will be happening with the experiment this time. That’s often the case. We have this beautiful machine here, she explains, but we just don’t get to run it that often.
The quest for the last undiscovered particle of orthodox physics has an aura of glory and pure truth to it. Or at least it does to those of us who are outside looking in. To those who are in the thick of the search, however, the glory can be obscured by the mind-numbing routine and the frustrating glitches, the truth blurred by hand waving, negotiation, and politics. It’s been said that anyone who loves the law or sausages shouldn’t watch how either is made. You might want to add Big Physics discoveries to the list.
As almost anyone in the particle physics community will be happy to tell you, Franklin has a hyperactive, offbeat sense of humor. Tall and deadpan, a young-looking 38, she stalks the hallways of Harvard and Fermilab making faces at some colleagues, suddenly jumping out at others. In airports and restaurants and on city streets she regularly accosts strangers to comment on their clothing or food, and to enlist their support in making fun of any reporters who happen to be hanging around with her at the time. She bursts into a Groucho Marx strut in the middle of Harvard Yard; at a coffee shop she empties a small sack of tiny plastic pigs onto the table without explanation. It’s bizarre, but it’s usually pretty funny, except for the reporter part. She’s a jazz sax player, a high school dropout, and the first female full professor in the Harvard physics department.
