Invisible Game

From an embryo,
whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.

    - Rumi, "Wean Yourself"

Monday, I watched my first muon decay. It was tiny and invisible, caught in a matrix of polyvinyltoluene wrapped in a black-anodized aluminum shell, so of course I didn’t see the muon itself. What I saw was a couple of blips on an oscilloscope screen, driven by a photomultiplier tube which had gathered perhaps a few hundred photons each, first from the muon grinding to a halt in the plastic like a runaway truck, and then from the nano-supernova of the muon’s death scream a couple of microseconds later. And I saw the coincidence counter rack up another probable decay event.

It’s going to be a long, hard road from this simple beginning to a device adequate for the experiment I want to perform. But I’m really stoked, after three years of theorizing, to finally be in the lab gearing up to test my ideas against Nature. To be gathering statistics, measuring noise levels, tuning discriminator thresholds, adding up power consumption.

I think that also puts me a decade or two ahead of the string theorists, who have NO IDEA how they’re going to test any of their concepts yet.

Call me Hunter Of Muons.