How do you search for something when you don’t know what you’re looking for?

Most physicists at Illinois-based Fermilab, home to the world’s most powerful particle collider, share a dream. They hope against hope that the Tevatron will find the long-sought Higgs particle before the much more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN — the European particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland — comes along in a year or so and eats their lunch. Bruce Knuteson, though, has a fear. What if the LHC finds something even more exotic than the Higgs —and the tell-tale traces of that novelty turn out to have been lurking, unrecognized, in Fermilab’s data for years?

Read the story here.

How do you search for something when you don’t know what you’re looking for?

Most physicists at Illinois-based Fermilab, home to the world’s most powerful particle collider, share a dream. They hope against hope that the Tevatron will find the long-sought Higgs particle before the much more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN — the European particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland — comes along in a year or so and eats their lunch. Bruce Knuteson, though, has a fear. What if the LHC finds something even more exotic than the Higgs —and the tell-tale traces of that novelty turn out to have been lurking, unrecognized, in Fermilab’s data for years?

Read the story here.