The unknown ... ???

Particle physicists have learned a "meta-scientific" lesson in the past 50 years: precision experiments will uncover unexpected things. Astronomers have learned something similar: observations in new energy ranges will uncover unexpected things. This has been the case since they days of Newton, of Faraday, of Bohr. There is usually something buried in the noise, something that yesterday's best experiment could not see. Sometimes it is an unanticipated aspect of existing laws of physics (like Van Allen's discovery of Earth's radiation belts), sometimes it is a new law or phenomenon entirely (like Hahn and Meitner's discovery of fission). AMS-02 is the new precision high-energy experiment; it is bigger and longer-lived and more discriminating than any particle detector ever launched. So, no matter how we fare with our expected physics topics - strangelets, Be-10, antihelium, neutralinos, microquasars, and everything else - we hope to reap a scientific bounty, maybe even a revolutionary one, from the things we did not even know to look for.
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