Catchword: ambulance chasing

Filed under: English, Science, Slang

Part of speech: n.

Quotation: In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call “ambulance chasing.” He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were spitting out weird triplets of particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons. Dr. Weinberg canceled reservations at a lodge in Yosemite National Park to spend the weekend with his colleague Benjamin Lee, trying to concoct a theory to explain the trimuons. But the only theory he and Dr. Lee could come up with was ugly. A few weeks later it turned out that the triplet effect wasn’t true.

Article or document title:
“At Fermilab, the Race Is on for the ‘God Particle’” (URL)

Author:
Dennis Overbye

Article, document, publication, web site:
New York Times

Date of publication:
July 24, 2007

This cite belongs to a full entry for ambulance-chasing.