I was very happy today to sign a contract with an international publisher that will publish a book I have written. The book, titled "Anomaly! - Scientific Discoveries and the Quest for the Unknown", focuses on the CDF experiment, a particle detector that operated at the Tevatron collider for 30 years.
The Tevatron was the highest-energy collider until the turn-on of the LHC. The CDF and DZERO experiments there discovered the sixth quark, the top, and produced a large number of world-class results in particle physics.
The CDF collaboration was made by over 50 institutions from many countries in the world, and counted over 500 physicists among its members. The history of the search for new physics in the Tevatron data is interesting and fun to tell -and I hope also fun to read- as CDF was a place rich with brilliant scientists, who interacted and collaborated while pursuing both common and more private goals. They usually had divergent views on what and how to publish; the collaboration always managed to find a consensus on those matters, although it was sometimes hard and painful.
CDF unearthed many unexplained anomalies in its data. Despite their controversial nature, most of those anomalies eventually found their difficult way to a publication. Their history, peppered with descriptions of the personality clashes and internal debates that these oddities fostered among the authors of the analyses and the rest of the collaboration, is definitely worth telling about.
As a member of CDF from 1992 to 2012, I have been a witness of those stories. But I did not come to know everything as events unfolded. In order to reconstruct what happened behind the scenes I had to interview over 100 of my former colleagues. I am quite indebted with them for their help, as they allowed me to write a book which, while a personal rather than an objective account of the stories, should not contain too many misrepresentations or distortions.
In particular, the book contains a number of dialogues reported as faithfully as is possible, anecdotes, and personal recollections from the scientists who manned the experiment. And it of course describes, as simply as possible but not more simply, the physics behind the anomalous signals of new physics unearthed by CDF. In that sense the text is also a crash course on particle physics (and two initial chapters have exactly that function).
I hope you will get to read the book, and enjoy doing it as I enjoyed writing it... More information to come as I obtain a tentative estimate of the publication date.
