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Fermilab and the Tevatron sit in the Illinois countryside near Chicago.

The world of physics is abuzz with news coming from Fermilab. It's the largest particle physics laboratory in the United States and the place where I did my first postdoctoral fellowship. Scientists there have been very busy lately. For the past few months they have been pondering a bizarre and unexpected signal from one Fermilab's detectors, the giant CDF.

While the venerable Standard Model of particle physics — which summarizes all that we know of the world of subatomic particles and their interactions — predicts that the signal for a particular process should go down with energy, the data from Fermilab is showing a mysterious bump at about 144 times the mass of a proton. With results collected so far, the odds that the bump is just a false alarm are less that about 0.076 percent. The technical article describing the findings can be found here.

While it may only be an anomaly. The Idea that the standard model of particle physics could change just demonstrates how tentative our understanding of the universe really is.