In search of Ipha

摘要

Why are physicists racing to pin down one of nature's constants to the umpteenth decimal place? The answer cuts to the heart of all we see and touch. On A hefty aluminium table in a Harvard University basement sits the biggest atom in the world. The culmination of 20 years' work, it looks like two oil drums stacked on top of one another, sprouting wires and tubing out the top. The drums contain powerful superconducting magnets, charged metal plates and special refrigerators - all to do a job usually accomplished by the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. "God would be ashamed if he made an apparatus this big," says Harvard physicist Gerald Gabrielse, the device's creator. "He did it with just the proton."