The muon is 200 times heavier than the electron and still lighter than any hadron, which make it’s interactions, at once, potentially sensitive to undiscovered phenomena, and predictable to high precision within the Standard Model. The muon’s ease of production, natural polarization and self analyzing decay, and comparatively long lifetime also allow for extremely high precision measurements of fundamental constants and interactions. Muons thus offer a unique probe to search for physics beyond the Standard Model.

This discussion will first elaborate on some of the experimental and theoretical niceties of the muon, and briefly look at the particle from a historical perspective, emphasizing a few of the many important roles that it’s played in piecing together our current understanding of particle physics. We will then look at a variety of anomalies in experiments using muons, which, taken together may suggest the possibility of sensitivity to new physics within reach of future experiments, some of which will also be looked at. Topics include recent developments in the proton radius puzzle, the muon anomalous magnetic moment, hints of lepton flavor non-universality in B decays, and searches for charged lepton flavor violation. For fun, a recent discovery in the Great Pyramid of Giza using muon tomography will also be discussed.