2020-02-20 11:44:22

Alone on a Mountaintop, Awaiting a Very Hard Rain

The Cosmic Ray Research Station, on Mount Aragats in Armenia. In its heyday, more than 100 scientists worked there tracking high-energy particles from space.


But the universe is still the biggest and cheapest particle accelerator of them all. And so the buildings and the instruments at Aragats remain, like ghost ships in the cosmic rain, maintained for long stretches of time by a skeleton crew of two technicians and a cook. They still wait for news that could change the universe: a quantum bullet more powerful than humans can produce, or weirder than their tentative laws can explain; trouble blowing in from the sun.  Read more...