A. E. Stuchbery

Deep underground, in a former gold mine in Australia, stands a laboratory where silence is broken only by rare flashes of light. These flashes are the traces of cosmic particles that punch through hundreds of meters of rock. Eight plastic panels, resembling large glowing sheets, catch these particles.

In 1978, physicists bombarded a target with a beam of ions and measured how quickly they slowed down in matter. Using the Doppler shift of gamma rays, they calculated the lifetimes of excited nuclear states. For iron-58, they obtained a value that did not agree with shell-model calculations.