Anniversaries

30 years ago: First flight of Columbia. I remember it well, especially the anxiety over the heat-shield tiles that popped loose from the Orbital Maneuvering System pods. The Shuttle's reusable heat shield was one of the biggest technological risks involved with the project. They got back in one piece (though the Wikipedia article describes a lot of scary associated problems I never heard about at the time), but heat-shield damage would eventually doom Columbia over twenty years later, though it wasn't the tiles that failed.

It seems insane now, but NASA wanted to get up to 60+ flights a year and replace all existing satellite launchers with the Shuttle. It was going to be a new era of large-scale exploitation of space. For a kid interested in this stuff it was tremendously exciting.

50 years ago: "I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!"

150 years ago: The US Civil War begins.

Unexpected bump at CDF

Via ronebofh: A good Ars Technica article about anomalous results from the Fermilab Tevatron's CDF, suggesting something with a mass of roughly 140 GeV (greater than the W and Z particles but smaller than the top quark), which decays to a pair of jets of particles. It seems to appear in proton-antiproton collisions that also produce a W particle (which, in the particular interactions they're examining, decays to an electron or muon and its associated antineutrino). The Ars Technica article does a good job of describing how all this gets detected.

I read the preprint, which, in the way of such things, is quite short but fairly technical, and mostly concerned with the efforts taken to subtract out various backgrounds and estimate systematic errors. They don't have enough statistics yet to say firmly that they've got something, and it's always possible there's some systematic they're overlooking. It will be interesting to see what the competing D0 team on the other side of the Tevatron has to say.

The one beyond-Standard-Model possibility that they specifically mention, and then reject, is that it's a light Standard Model Higgs particle (edit: I just realized that that sentence is internally contradictory; "beyond known particles" might be the better phrase). Its behavior isn't consistent with that. It's worth mentioning that the Standard Model Higgs particle is only the simplest possible version; there's no reason to particularly insist that there isn't other stuff about in that regime, and it would be kind of disappointing if the CERN LHC and other accelerators only found that and nothing else. Here's hoping there's lots of interesting new physics to find.

I remember the excitement when Melissa Franklin (the "M. Franklin" in the author list) came back from CDF with news about evidence for (and, later, discovery of) the top quark. It's fun to see that by now the top quark is just another element of the background to subtract away.