A new generation of physicists hope to succeed where Einstein failed
By THIS IS A PREVIEW.or to access the full article.Already a subscriber or purchased this issue?Leslie Rosenberg's attempt to understand the universe resembles a makeshift home hot-water heater tank, capped with some wires and shoved into a large, underground refrigerator. The experiment, housed in a laboratory adjacent to his office at the University of Washington, is a supercooled, magnetized vacuum chamber equipped with a sensitive detector that listens for the microwave “ping” of passing particles called axions. These particles are invisible and, so far, entirely hypothetical.
Rosenberg has been on the trail of this particle ever since he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s. In that time he has performed experiment after experiment, achieving ever greater precision and yet always the same old empty results, hoping for the positive detection that could rescue Albert Einstein's biggest—and most star-crossed—idea.
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