Power and Electric Motors

I’m Shocked! Shocked! to Find There Are Neutrinos Going On Here

[E]xperimental physics is (and has always been) very, very hard to do, involving an effort to push the limits of precision beyond any current standard. Because the effects sought are at the limits of our capacity to detect them (necessarily; if it were easy, we’d have seen whatever it was already) there is an enormous amount of subtle knowledge that goes into constructing the framework of each experiment. The machines don’t just have to work; you have to understand in detail how quantum mechanics and relativity and all the increasingly subtle applications of the broad ideas play out at the speeds and energies and distances involved. Understanding what’s actually happening at the subtle edges of experiments — even seemingly simply ones — turns out to be very difficult to do.