‘TIS the season to be jolly, though after a year in which the much-anticipated Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been delayed, you might think particle physicists don’t have much to be jolly about. Two very different developments, however, have made 2008 particularly exciting for them.
The first shows that with a good theory and hard work, we can unlock nature’s deepest mysteries. The story began in the 1960s, when it was proposed that protons and neutrons are made up of constituents called quarks. Experiments then demonstrated that protons did contain point-like components. These bounced around inside protons as if…
