Some 20 years ago, University of Pennsylvania particle physicist Alfred Mann worked hard to create a national underground science laboratory in the US. He came close, but in the end couldn’t generate enough interest in the physics community. He was forced to take his neutrino research to the Kamiokande II detector in Japan.
“I realized at the time that [neutrino] physics was going to become more and more important and there was no place in the US to do it,” Mann said. There still isn’t, and that in part explains why Mann, now 82, boarded an airplane and flew from Pennsylvania to South Dakota in mid-April to try to stop the threatened flooding of the Homestake gold mine near the picturesque Black Hills town of Lead (pronounced leed ).
The April intervention of Mann, Penn astrophysicist Ken Lande, and other scientists, combined with the efforts of South Dakota Governor Mike...
