[If you are a layperson interested in the faster-than-light neutrino claim, and you haven’t yet looked at my recent “open-space’’ post and the list of excellent questions laypeople have asked in the comments, you definitely should. And ask your own if you want. That post also gives an organized list of links to my main posts on the neutrino experiment.]
Today is a sad day in American particle physics. It is the day that Fermilab will shut down the Tevatron, once the world’s leading particle accelerator, which discovered and measured the mass and other properties of the top quark (the sixth discovered, and by far the heaviest), tested the Standard Model of particle physics in very great detail (confirming that everything I wrote in this post about the known particles is correct to the available precision of the experiment), and looked hard for the Higgs particle before being overtaken by the Large Hadron Collider. (more…)
