Challenge

I don't think I've ever linked Tommaso Dorigo's blog. He wrote a book Anomaly!, about the CDF experiment, and posted "The Revenge of the Slimeballs" chapter online in 5 parts. I wish I could say I contributed to this result.

SLAC was running an electron collider--they were set to measure a "world's best" Z boson mass and width. An electron collider has far cleaner events than a proton/antiproton collider, and tight control of the center of mass energy. They were going to publish soon, but some of their members were less than polite about their competitors at the hadron collider (CDF and D0). True a hadron collider event is extremely messy and it is very hard to know what the center-of-mass energy is because the proton and antiproton are made of lots of parts that don't share energy exactly--so which ones hit each other?

But you shouldn't make people mad. They might take the challenge.

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4
5. Part 5

Spoiler--the CDF team managed to get the measurement, and get it better than the SLAC team, and even finagle a way to present it first.