Most kids obsess over dinosaurs. Not Daniel Derrig. By the age of 7 he had already designed his first particle accelerator and worn down several pencils calculating the mass of the ephemeral neutrino. Derrig, who lives in Mountain Home, Arkansas, with his dad, a retired cop, and mom, a nurse, knows it's never too soon to start cultivating the right contacts. So to celebrate his 8th birthday last month, he asked Fermilab officials if he could come visit. Director John Peoples went a step further and threw him a party, complete with cake and tour. "He's an endearing kid," says theoretical physics head Keith Ellis. "He said he thought he'd seen a [long-sought] supersymmetric particle on his way in. ... [That] sort of blew my mind."
Derrig told Science he has attempted what has eluded more seasoned minds--to predict the mass of neutrinos. He tried using subtraction, but the answers "turned out pretty silly", he says: "The electron neutrino weighed more than an electron! I mean how could they go at the speed of light if they're that heavy?" Not surprisingly, Derrig hopes to work at Fermilab someday.
