Made on Earth

摘要

We are getting used to Big Physics. Giant telescopes stare up at the heavens, huge doughnut-shaped machines coax atomic nuclei into fusing, and mammoth accelerators smash subatomic particles together. But for a group of particle physicists who want to study neutrinos, these projects are small fry. They want a laboratory the size of the Earth. If they get their way, they'll soon be building an entirely new type of particle accelerator, known as a neutrino factory, that will produce vast quantities of neutrinos and fire them through the Earth at detectors on the other side of the world. It's a machine that might help answer some of nature's most perplexing mysteries.