Really cool article Hive account@lemouth ! A couple of questions tangential to the whistle-stop tour of particle detection:

1. What makes the muon decay lifetime so much longer compared to the more unstable particles you describe?

2. Is there a process/system in place at CERN & other particle physics labs which enables some kind of "indepedence of pre-decided measurement bias"?

This is a bit hard for me to explain here, but I'll attempt it anyway:

I think I'm semi-correct in saying that In particle physics measurements, the detectors have some kind of filter in place to minimize the amount of extraneous noise being processed, so that the only set of signals being passed on for digital signal processing ("DSP") fall in within the scope of the sorts of signal sets that are being looked for (otherwise there'd be too much data to process).
....If this is the case: is there any scope for allowing for a random check of the noise data to be sampled?

Reading what I've just written makes it almost obvious that that approach isn't practical, because if the additional un-wanted "noise" is present, what could be in place to make any kind of decisions as to whether or not something novel is being found....

The issue I'm really struggling to articulate here is: is there a risk that in filtering out the "fire hose" of data before it ever reaches the DSP, serendipitous discovery becomes highly unlikely?

This has been bugging me for 35 years by the way, ever since I first read about particle physics when I was in my teens, so an answer would be very much appreciated :)