Fermilab's giant magnet begins its journey into the quantum badlands

Two years ago, a huge magnet made its way from Brookhaven, New York to Fermilab, Illinois, via Florida and the Mississippi. And that's not the strangest thing about it.

Infinitesimally small particles, such as the electrons in our wires and the muons that bombard us from space, are tiny magnets. This is because they carry angular momentum - spin - and also have electric charge.

Magnetic fields happen whenever electric charge moves around, so the fact that charge-with-spin leads to a magnetic dipole - they have two poles, North and South, like the Earth, or any other magnet - is not a big surprise. What may be more surprising is that making precise measurements of the strength of these magnetic dipoles can give us glimpses into regions of physics beyond the reach even of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator.