To Observe the Muon Is to Experience Hints of Immortality

Attempting to model the universe as precisely as possible is to try to see the one thing that even the strictest atheist agrees is everlasting.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KATE DEHLER

ALL PEOPLE WANT to enact a paradigm shift, don't they? Even if it's not mRNA, or Lego, we want at least, on our one chance on Earth, to make a meme happen.

So imagine the excitement on April 7, when more than 200 physicists from seven countries convened on a Zoom call for a kind of nonexplosive gender-reveal party. What was to be disclosed was not a baby's sex but the fate of particle physics.

While the rest of the world has spent more than a year preoccupied with epidemiology, this team of physicists has spent three years collecting data for something called the Muon g-2 experiment, a much anticipated project headquartered at Fermilab, a physics and accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, that is overseen by the Department of Energy. The physicists had done their work half in the dark, with a key variable concealed. If you want a eureka badly enough, after all, you might be tempted to help the data along. Now the lights were coming on.