MONDAY, February 9:

Recently I spent a week hanging around the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Batavia, Illinois, which is home to the Tevatron, currently the world's largest particle accelerator. (What's a particle accelerator?) A bigger one, the LHC, is under construction at CERN in Switzerland; it will have a cyclotron, a bottle opener, and itty-bitty scissors. For the moment, Fermilab is the cutting edge of impractical science.

In the Tevatron, particles get revved up to nearly the speed of light, and smashed together to create exotic and literally unimaginable types of matter.

I don't know quite what I was expecting, but the lab site itself radically unimposing. Batavia in the winter is flat and gray, and an inch of dirty winter snow only adds to the bleakness.

But I wasn't there for the scenery, (cue music) my assignment was to observe the culture and rituals of the site's inhabitants - some of the world's top elementary particle physicists. I had an appointment with Arnd Meyer, a professor from Aachen University in Germany, and administrator of the control room for DZero, one of the lab's two full-time experiments...