Randy Lewis was happy to hear the news, but he was nowhere near surprised. He expected Tuesday’s discovery of two new subatomic particles since he predicted their existence five years ago.
“It’s certainly a very nice feeling,” the York University physicist told the Star.
“Finding these two shows our experiments, which are very challenging, are being done correctly.”
Scientists at the world’s largest particle accelerator, the 27-km CERN Large Hadron Collider that straddles the French-Swiss border, announced Tuesday that they had detected a pair of brand new particles, infinitesimal bits of matter smaller than an atom.
Lewis, who teaches physics and astronomy in Toronto, is among a handful of specialists to have forecast the existence of these particles, in his case in a 2009 research paper he co-authored with Richard Woloshyn, from Vancouver’s TRIUMF Laboratory. The scientists wrote out lengthy calculations by hand and ran their equations through a computer program and then pored over their results, Lewis explained. read more...
Additional resources:
New subatomic particles fulfill Canadian physicists’ prediction - The Globe and Mail
New subatomic particles predicted by Canadians found at CERN - CBC