With the Higgs boson all but confirmed, there’s an opening for a new hard-to-understand but vitally-important subatomic particle that can jump into the gap and grab the media spotlight.
Enter Sam Ting, the smiling but taciturn MIT physicist who has just become a person of interest to the particle paparazzi.
Dr. Ting, who already has a Nobel prize to his name, happens to run the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a $1.5-billion piece of hardware currently whizzing around Earth on board the International Space Station.
Now Dr. Ting has let drop that his experiment has revealed something significant about dark matter, the invisible stuff that accounts for most of the mass in the universe. Exactly what he has found, he won’t say, but today in a hushed room packed with journalists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Ting promised to reveal all with the first publication of AMS results in the coming two or three weeks.
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