Chapter 9: Preon Dreams

In this chapter we deal with one of the most intriguing and exciting among the several anomalies that arose in the analysis of Run 1 data. One which lent itself to an immediate, startling interpretation: maybe quarks are themselves composite objects after all! The possibility of such a revolutionary discovery sucked the CDF collaboration into the center of the first media storm of its career. The coverage of the story by the press was comparable in intensity to the news on the top discovery, which had been announced only a few months earlier. But, in this case, the management of the experiment was caught entirely unprepared. The unanticipated and uncoordinated interviews that science reporters obtained directly from members of the collaboration, as well as the uncontrolled claims artfully inserted in some of the resulting articles, generated a good deal of friction within the experiment.