Chapter 6: Top-Quark Battles

As Run 1 data started to fill the Exabyte storage tapes in the vault of the Feynman center, the CDF collaboration displayed the first symptoms of a sort of superiority complex with respect to the rest of the world of high-energy physics. Surely, the LEP accelerator was a giant marvel, and the exquisite measurements of the properties of the Z boson that the four CERN experiments had been producing in e⁺e⁻ collisions since 1989 were an impressive achievement. Yet, the Tevatron was the highest energy collider: here laid the forefront of research in particle physics. And it was CDF who would tell the world whether there was a sixth quark; CDF would discover whatever new physics was waiting at the high-energy frontier…