Science: Window on Mystery

As atom smashers have grown larger and more powerful, the subatomic particles that scientists have been able to find have grown stranger and more elusive. Still, it hardly seemed probable that anyone would ever discover another bit of matter quite so peculiar as the neutrino, first detected near a nuclear reactor in 1956. So light that it weighs nothing at all, the neutrino is free of electric charge and can pass through the heaviest materials as if it were hurtling through empty space. But last week, a team of Columbia University physicists did the...

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