Re: The gulf between father and son is called `quantum physics' by Dave Barry

[Jack Uretsky <jlu@HEP.ANL.GOV>]

 "They" are still looking for proton decay in a number of places,
including the Soudan mine in Northern Minnesota.  The Soudan group has just
completed 5 kiloton years of exposure, and limits on certain decay
modes are about to be published.
        The recent experimental results showing a deficit of muon
neutrinos in cosmic rays ("evidence for neutrino mass") were done at
facilities which were set up to detect proton decay.  Cosmic rays are
background for p-decay events, so proton decay experiments are necessarily
simultaneously cosmic ray experiments.
        The p-decay experiments are good enough to have excluded some
formerly popular theories of matter, most notably the simplest versions
of an SU(5) quark substructure.  No proton decay events have been
unambiguously detected to date.
                                Regards,
                                        Jack

Adam was by constitution and proclivity a scientist; I was the same, and
we loved to call ourselves by that great name...Our first memorable
scientific discovery was the law that water and like fluids run downhill,
not up.
                          Mark Twain, <Extract from Eve's Autobiography>

On Sun, 9 Jan 2000, Leigh Palmer wrote:

> Dave Barry's piece reminded me of when I sent my best undergraduate
> student off to grad school at Harvard. He wrote me back in his first
> year there that the proton was unstable and would decay in (I think)
> 10^39 years or so. He appended some significant personal reservation,
> however, so I think we raised him right while he was here at SFU.
>
> He got his PhD in four years flat working with Steven Weinberg, and
> he is now a professor at the University of Toronto.
>
> They're still looking for proton decay, I understand, in Japan. They
> have found massive mu neutrinos there, so perhaps that's the right
> place to look for proton decay.
>
> Leigh