he Navy has lots of plans for the "Holy Grail" of energy weapons, from burning enemy missiles out of the sky to helping aim a ship's traditional guns. But the Navy has a more expansive use in mind for its Free Electron Laser: find the basic power source of the universe.

Oliver K. Baker is a 51 year-old Yale particle physicist. Every few months, he leaves tweedy New Haven for the Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia, where he powers up the Navy's Free Electron Laser, a laser the size of a schoolbus that uses supercharged electron streams to generate photons in one of a multitude of wavelengths. He fires the resultant beam of light into a tube containing a vacuum — all in the hope of finding trace elements of so-called "dark energy,"

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