FUN WITH PHYSICS.(physicist Janet Conrad)

Janet Conrad fell in love with the universe at 3 a.m. on a cold autumn night in Wooster, Ohio. A teen-ager, she had no desire to get out of bed and face the frigid air in order to help her father, a dairy scientist, spray warm water on the prize dahlias they were growing together. But when she did go out to the garden she saw, for the first time in her life, how a shower of electrically charged particles flung from a star ninety-three million miles away can cover the sky in glowing pastel curtains. "I remember standing there and looking at the northern lights, and it was so neat that something so remote, so very far away, could be creating something so beautiful right in front of my eyes,"she says. Twenty-five years later, Conrad, who is now thirty-nine and an associate professor of physics at Columbia University, created her own universe--a spherical particle detector, forty feet in diameter, that she built under an igloo of dirt at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), near Chicago. The particle detector is lined with a constellation of twelve hundred eight-inch-wide "eyes,"or phototubes, and is filled with eight hundred tons of baby oil, which is used to detect the shock waves generated by particle interactions. Early last fall, the detector began an unblinking vigil for subatomic stealth particles known as "sterile"neutrinos.

A lot can go wrong in large-scale physics experiments. Conrad has been basted in foul-smelling oil. She has been squirted with sticky insulating goo. She has had giant helium balloons get away because the soccer nets she was using to hold them down came loose. And she watched in dismay as the pristine white tank for her current experiment acquired a tough yellow scum (which her mother helpfully advised her to remove with Arm & Hammer baking soda). Nothing that Conrad has done in the past, however, approaches the challenge of her current experiment, which involves some fifty scientists from twelve institutions--including the experiment's co-leader, Bill Louis, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Conrad's goal is to understand the character of neutrinos, mere wisps of matter that are more numerous, more elusive, and arguably more important than any other subatomic particle.

Neutrinos outnumber all ordinary particles by a billion to one--a thousand trillion of them occupy your body at every second, streaming down from the sky, up from the ground, and even from radioactive atoms inside you. But, for all their omnipresence, they might just as well be ghosts. As John Updike put it in his poem "Cosmic Gall":

The earth is just a silly ball, Neutrinos can slip through a hundred light-years' worth of lead without stirring up so much as a breeze, and yet they power the most violent events in the universe, making stars shine and, in the process, creating every element, every dust mote, every raindrop, and, ultimately, every thought. They are the alchemists of the cosmos, the catalysts that make nuclear fusion possible, releasing the radiation that melts rock and makes the continents move. Because neutrinos can penetrate almost everything, they can take scientists to places they've never been before--into the cores of exploding stars, for instance, or back to the big bang. As the universe evolved, neutrinos, because they interact so rarely with other particles, were, in effect, left behind, frozen in time. They are still there (or here, if you will) today, imprinted with information about the state of the universe at its birth. Most important, neutrinos break the basic rules that govern other particles, thereby suggesting that the rules themselves are wrong. If Conrad's experiment confirms her suspicions, she will show that a particle that was barely believed to exist can carry enough weight to determine the drape of galaxies.

When I met up with Conrad at a gathering of the group of Columbia professors who work on high-energy physics, she was the only woman there. Some of her fellow-physicists seemed not to know what to make of her. In contrast to earlier generations of women physicists, she has managed to remain unabashedly girlish. She uses words like "neat"and "cool,"and her talks are often embellished with whimsical drawings and analogies to hair dye, shopping, or flowers. "She gets away with it because she knows her stuff so well--nobody can attack her,"Bonnie Fleming, a Fermilab physicist, says. Rocky Kolb, a cosmologist at Fermilab, ...