Don Lincoln is a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab, the country's leading particle physics research institution. He also writes about science for the public, including his recent "The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Stuff That Will Blow Your Mind" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). You can follow him on Facebook. Lincoln contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Scientific discoveries come in many forms, like the surprise of radioactivity or the long search for the predicted Higgs boson. But some discoveries are mixed, with a hint in the data pointing to future measurements that can take years. A scientific study of the third kind is getting underway now, and the payoff for physics could be huge.
On Tuesday (Feb. 6), a collaboration of 190 scientists operating at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois began using an array of magnets arranged in a ring 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter to make one of the most precise measurements ever performed. In this research, called the g-2 experiment (pronounced "g minus 2"), or just g-2 for short, scientists will measure what is called the anomalous magnetic moment of the rare subatomic particle called a muon, which is a heavy cousin of the electron and spins sort of like a top. The muon, however, exists for only 2.2 millionths of a second when at rest. [Beyond Higgs: 5 Elusive Particles That May Lurk in the Universe]
