Not As a Stranger

Back in the 19305 when the nuclear era began, the building blocks of matter seemed simple enough. There were neutrons and protons nestled in the nucleus of the atom, electrons spinning around it, and photons to carry electromagnetic radiation. That seemed to be it. Then, after the big bomb-building breakthrough and the construction of billion-electron volt accelerators, scientists discovered a chaotic array of new particles. Some were so short-lived that their age was measured in less than a billionth of a second, their very existence inferred from the erratic tracks they left in bubble and cloud chambers. Some left no tracks at all. The list proliferated to the sound of Greek letters--eta, rho, omega, lambda, sigma, xi--until it seemed that the alphabet might run out.

Even the vocabulary of physics changed. Vague terms such as "strangeness" cropped up to describe mathematically the way these new unstable particles differ from the old familiar ones. Some of the new particles were called "resonances," a term that describes familiar particles temporarily bound together. "There was a sense of uneasiness," says Czech-born California Physicist Harold Ticho. "We were turning up a mess of disconnected beasts which seemed to have no relation to any theory of nature."

Among the first attempts to make order out of this chaos was Caltech Physicist Murray Gell-Mann's theory, "The Eight-Fold Way." Gell-Mann lumped the known resonances together in orderly octets; their snowflake-like symmetries left slots for particles that were still unknown. But one octet seemed out of kilter. Unless, predicted Gell-Mann, a particle designated the phi-meson was found.

A hint of the phi-meson came from

Brookhaven-Syracuse University study last summer in Geneva. Last week experimental teams on opposite coasts of the U.S. confirmed its existence. They used two of the world's largest atom smashers, Brookhaven's Synchrotron and Berkeley's Bevatron, to fire negatively charged K mesons into a hydrogen bubble chamber. After the mesons collided with hydrogen nuclei, the scientists found two K mesons that were the decay products of an even more ephemeral particle. It has a life span of just 2/1 0,000th of a billionth of a billionth of a second--or just long enough to travel a few widths of an atomic nucleus at the speed of light. But its discovery carries the curious and unpredictable importance of all successful basic research. Now there is a little less strangeness in the whirligig, subatomic world.

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