Digging for dark matter in an abandoned mine
Rick Gaitskell and I first met over lunch in Deadwood, South Dakota, back in the summer of 2012. An astrophysicist who had quit investment banking because he found the mathematics of finance too basic, Gaitskell had just emerged from an underground laboratory that was once among the nation’s richest gold mines. He was now sitting across from me and talking, quite literally, about everything in the universe.
He swooped in great conversational arcs from his English boyhood to the best method for extracting a single recorded voice from a babble of background noise, from the nature of weakly interacting…
