Hoping to escape the doldrums of a monotonously successful theory, particle physicists are scrambling to launch two new vessels on a race into the unknown. The craft are particle smashers at the KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, and the Stanford (Calif.) Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). The underground machines promise to carry researchers deep into an ill-mapped realm of physics known as charge-parity (CP) violation. After years of construction (SN: 10/16/93, p. 245), workers on both sides of the Pacific are this week gingerly firing up the particle beams of their newly assembled electron-positron colliders.
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