ALL PEOPLE WANT to enact a paradigm shift, don't they? Even if it's not mRNA, or Lego, we want at least, on our one chance on Earth, to make a meme happen. So imagine the excitement on April 7, when more than 200 physicists from seven countries convened on a Zoom call for a kind of nonexplosive gender-reveal party. What was to be disclosed was not a baby's sex but the fate of particle physics. While the rest of the world has spent more than a year preoccupied with epidemiology, this team of physicists has spent three years collecting data for something called the Muon g-2 experiment, a much anticipated project headquartered at Fermilab, a physics and accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, that is overseen by the Department of Energy. The physicists had done their work half in the dark, with a key variable concealed. If you want a eureka badly enough, after all, you might be tempted to help the data along. Now the lights were coming on.
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