It was a time of fierce (but friendly) international competition, when physicists still built things with their own two hands. Dotted with barracks and trenches, Brookhaven was yet to fully transform its face from army camp to research institution.
In the early 1950s, the physics community was at the horizon of the boom of discoveries that define our understanding of the universe.
Before quarks, neutrinos, and CP violation could be found, scientists needed a tool much more powerful than Brookhaven's Cosmotron -- the leading particle accelerator of the time. The problem: building an…
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