Why Congress Should Care About the Laws of Physics
Recent research seems to challenge the fundamentals of the field. The U.S. should support the quest for answers.
There’s still so much to discover.
Photograph: Stéphane Guisard/ESO via Wikimedia Commons
The most extraordinary event of the year — and perhaps the 21st century — made few national headlines. But it may just alter the future of the human race, and it should lead both parties in Congress to support a major investment increase in the nation’s research and development infrastructure.
The event happened in Batavia, Illinois, about 35 miles west of Chicago, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Rarely does a single experiment threaten to upend the known laws of the universe. But so it was on April 7, when a group of more than 200 physicists published a paper with a deceptively modest title: “Measurement of the Positive Muon Anomalous Magnetic Moment to 0.46 ppm.”