Chapter 3: Revenge of the Slimeballs

In late August 1985 a fixed-target run of the newly commissioned Tevatron was terminated ahead of schedule due to the failure of a magnet. A few days later, the 5000-ton central detector was rolled into the collision hall: an engineering run in collider mode could finally start. For the first time, the Tevatron began circulating protons and antiprotons at 800 GeV per beam, attempting to create collisions in the core of CDF. This was little more than a first test, meant to verify the operational status of the accelerator. It was not expected to deliver a significant amount of data to the still incomplete detector. Hence, there was no real chance to produce physics results yet…