On April 26, the news wires buzzed briefly with an announcement from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois: 439 leading particle physicists - some 25 Harvard faculty, students, and alumni among them - had signed a 150-page paper suggesting evidence of a phenomenon known as the top quark.

That finding, if confirmed, would mark a watershed in the history of physics: a final experimental proof of the so-called Standard Model, the widely accepted theory that describes the structure of matter.

But this is not a "discovery" - not yet. The results fall short of statistical conclusiveness. And while the Fermilab scientists fully expect confirmation within the year, they decided to publish their preliminary results because, in all likelihood, they have taken a decisive step towards a major advance in pure science.

That decision may also suggest the physicists' discovery of a less pure kind of science. When Congress cancelled the mammoth Superconducting Supercollidor (SSC) last year - writing off a $3 billion investment, and shattering hundreds of careers in the process - particle physicists learned a painful lesson in realpolitik.

But first, the pure part. In 1964, California Institute of Technology physicist Murray Gell-Mann posited that all matter consists of two families of particles: six leptons, and six quarks. Just as protons and neutrons combine to form atoms, so various combinations of quarks and leptons combine to form protons and neutrons.

Gell-Mann borrowed the quixotic term "quark" from a line in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake ("Three quarks for Muster Mark..."). In another flight of linguistic fancy, he decided to describe the types of quarks as "flavors": up and down, strange and charm, bottom and top.

Over the last thirty years, experiments have confirmed the existence of eleven of those twelve particles, but the top quark has remained elusive because it is by the largest and least stable of the particles. In fact, the top quark has not occurred naturally (at least in our sector of the Universe) for at least 10 billion years - since the fraction of a millisecond following the "big bang."

To re-create the energies that might have produced the top quark, the Fermilab created a 5000 ton, three-story device called the Collidor Detector. By swirling protons and antiprotons in opposite directions at velocities approaching the speed of light, the machine forces subatomic collisions that convert mass into pure energy (fulfilling Einstein's promise: e=mc2), which then returns to mass. At that moment - a trillionth of a trillionth of a second long - the top quark is thought to exist. It then decays into smaller particles, leaving only a whisper-trail of evidence behind.

Tracking that trail requires an elaborate statistical sifting process, through reams of data gathered from over a trillion separate reactions. "The discovery of 'top' is complicated because many events could give us a fake signature," says Professor John Huth, one of the paper's authors. "The systematics are tricky; there's always the problem of mis-estimating the probabilities."

The Fermilab physicists think they have found that evidence. In fact, they are 99.75% sure of it. But that remaining .25% degree matters in the realm of trillion-trillionth fractions. Conclusive proof would require a margin of .01%.

[Insert after graf ending: "The mass of 'top' is a critical parameter in establishing the reasons for the movement of time."]

Some of those questions might have proceeded much more smoothly with the help of the SSC, which was designed to investigate the forces (known as bosons) that bind quarks and leptons together. Now those questions will have to wait for at least a decade, until the Europeans can complete construction on a similar collider project in Switzerland.

When Congress finally lowered the axe on the SSC, physicists railed against what they considered an ill-informed and short-sighted decision. After all, the U.S. Government had poured billions into their research during the Cold War years; now a single congressional vote had effectively ended America's hard-won dominance in the field. On hearing the news, one embittered scientist called it "the revenge of the C students."

[Pick up here w/ graf beginning: "That remark - which Huth calls "unfortunate"... /AW]

- may have given voice to a common sentiment, but it won no points for diplomacy. In the wake of the SSC decision, physicists began to realize that they needed to polish up on their public relations.

"So much depends on the vision of the people making the policy decisions," says Melissa Franklin, a Physics Professor and co-author of the paper. "That's why scientists need to find new ways to share their excitement about these kinds of discoveries."

The SSC decision "was absolutely a motivating factor in the decision to publish," says George Brandenburg, another co-author and Senior Research Fellow in the Physics Department. "Unfortunately," he adds, "we're bereft of a coherent science policy. And that's absolutely crucial if you want to produce anything meaningful."

"What Science really needs is a forum, a way for scientists to involve themselves in public discussion of these issues" adds Franklin. "We need to find ways not just to explain what we're doing, but to communicate why this stuff is so interesting. We need to call out to people and say: 'Come here, look: this is incredibly cool.'"