From today’s New York Times:
The device, named the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, is designed to sift the high-energy particles flying through space known as cosmic rays. On Feb. 27, the space shuttle Endeavour will ferry the spectrometer to a permanent berth on the space station. But the real destination is the shadow universe.
…If they are lucky, scientists say, the Alpha spectrometer could confirm that mysterious signals recorded by other satellites and balloons in recent years are emanations from that dark matter, revealing evidence of particles and forces that have only been theoretical dreams until now.
…
Or the device could find even something weirder.
“Real discovery is outside the ring of existing knowledge,” said Samuel Chao Chung Ting, the 74-year-old Nobel laureate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and leader of the cosmic ray project, in his laboratory at CERN outside Geneva in August. A few yards away, the hulking spectrometer was sitting in a test frame, being pinged by a beam of protons in final tests before being shipped to Cape Canaveral.
Dr. Ting, one of science’s great control freaks and worrywarts, has spent his life commanding armies of physicists. In 1974 he discovered a particle that would revolutionize physics, but he took so long checking for errors and looking for more particles that another lab found it and he wound up splitting the Nobel.