They also remain forever trapped within the particles they create. But three decades of searching have proved fruitless. The late William Fairbank of Stanford University reported positive results in the 1980s, but his work could not be reproduced. The lack of success and, subsequently, funding has forced physicists galore to drop out of the chase. Only Martin L. Perl of Stanford remains.
Searches begin next year using ground-up meteorites.
Perl knows finding free quarks is a long shot. It's the kind of thing a tenured professor can do. It would wreck their careers. Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physics, Perl does not have that worry, although he plans to abandon the pursuit if nothing turns up in the next four years. But no one has ever seen anything resembling celestial antiobjects.