In Massachusetts, the infrared camera array known as the Dalek is constantly scanning the sky.
Photographer: Cassandra Klos for Bloomberg BusinessweekAmerica’s Leading Alien Hunters Depend on AI to Speed Their Search
Harvard’s Galileo Project has brought high-end academic research to a once-fringe pursuit, and the Pentagon is watching.
When Laura Dominé was getting her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University, her research was on neutrinos: elementary particles, minuscule even to physicists, that to laypeople sound made-up. Neutrinos are almost massless and electrically neutral, and therefore they pass through matter as if it were air. Trillions of the so-called ghost particles are zipping through you right now unnoticed, continuing journeys that began, for many of them, a single second after the Big Bang.
The detectors built to find evidence of neutrinos are themselves fantastical things. These cavernous chambers, deep in the Earth, are filled with heavy water or liquid argon and lined with exquisitely sensitive photosensors or grids of delicate wiring. Every once in a while, thanks to something called the weak force, a neutrino will react with a subatomic particle inside the vat and be rendered detectable by human instruments. Dominé worked on a machine learning algorithm that could spot these reactions, helping physicists continue to piece together their portrait of the neutrino and, through it, the workings of our strange universe.