Fermilab — Excursions Into Matter, Space and Time 71
An anonymous reader writes "Fermilab is one of the great physics research facilities in the U.S. It is mainly known for its Tevatron proton/anti-proton accelerator to help physicists understand how materials interact with each other. TG Daily has a extensive article detailing Fermilab's accelerator chain and the work that is being done there. It's an interesting read, especially since many of us won't have a chance to visit Fermilab and the fact that the Tevatron accelerator is scheduled to be shut down next year."
Fermilab Bison (Score:5, Interesting)
steel cuts like butter apparently (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it's on page 4 (Score:5, Interesting)
Some things it doesn't mention though, that I recall from my brief summer there 20+ years back:
* the radioactive groundhogs. Every national lab I've been to seemed to have a colony of groundhogs, I guess they like the security.... At Fermilab, there was a burrow in the middle of a mile-long berm of dirt that acted as a beam dump to generate neutrinos (only neutrinos make it through that much matter without being stopped).
* Wilson's artworks - I assume they're still around. Robert Wilson was the instigator of the lab, and got it built on time and under budget. He was also a bit of a sculptor, and a number of his artworks were on the grounds around the administration building. In fact I think he designed the rather unique admin building too.
* the annual "race around the ring" - actually, maybe that's gone away since Leon Lederman's no longer the lab director. It was quite a challenge when I was there though; you can imagine a bunch of desk physicists and engineers trying to make it around the 3+ miles of the ring road in a reasonable amount of time...
Nothing to see here: Move Along! (Score:4, Interesting)
"Most recently, you may have heard of discovery of the "triple scoop" baryon, which contains one quark from each generation of matter."
That's really all there is about "the work being done there". This is really just a sort of know your neighbors piece for the local pholks who drive by every day.
So, Captain, where do they keep the Death Ray?
Not so cool (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Actually, it's on page 4 (Score:5, Interesting)
They are. The power poles shaped like the Pi symbol are being replaced this summer, they even got the city of Batavia to pay for it.
One bit of entertaining lore (I can't confirm it's true but I've heard it from several lab veterans) about the art around the lab is the "symmetry" sculpture at the lab's west gate. It's a large arch with three limbs that towers over the roadway, and a visitor paying attention may notice the west-facing (public) side is painted completely black, and the east (lab) side is orange. The reason? Originally the sculpture was entirely orange. Stayed that way for almost 20 years. Eventually locals decided it was an eyesore, orange hasn't been a popular color since the 70's and I guess people got tired of it. So the lab painted the outside flat black to keep the peace with the community.
Orange and blue is still pretty common around the lab, the CDF detector building even got a fresh coat of paint last year. It is pretty ugly, but it's been that way for decades and it would suck to change it now.
Re:Not so cool (Score:3, Interesting)
Been there a couple of times (Score:3, Interesting)
My college roommate's older brother was a physicist who worked at Fermilab. We got a tour of the place while it was at the top of its game. (He later moved to CERN; it was a bit far to visit but he had interesting stories to make up for it. On a related note, my sister married a guy who worked at Argonne National Laboratory, so I got a VIP tour there, as well.)
Much later, during the dot-com collapse, I found myself on a job interview at Fermilab. They built a lot of custom Linux boxes and wrote a lot of software to run on them. It looked like an environment similar to Google today, with all the processing power you could imagine to throw at personal projects. At the time, you could easily download just about everything they wrote, but a lot of that disappeared after 9/11. A few people whom I trust warned that taking a government job would be a career killer for me, but the job I wound up taking paid even less. (Of course, my current job pays much better, so I guess that things even out.) Ultimately, I decided against moving my family 300 miles, but I still sometimes wish I'd taken the job.
Re:The Ring of Fire (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not like Fermilab is shutting down (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually I understood the site was to be a green-field site somewhere between Fermi and DeKalb. However they face a very hard battle getting it based in the US. There is still considerable resentment over the cancellation of the SSC in the international community: they got foreign investment and then the US congress cancelled the project. There is also the significant problem of visas which, although it has recently eased somewhat is still a major pain. Try persuading the Chinese or Indians that they should invest money in a lab that they will have significant problems ever visiting, let alone working at.
In the past the US could just front the cost by itself but the expense of the newest accelerators now requires global cooperation. So unless the US government can learn to act as a responsible funding partner and host it will be an uphill battle to get an international science projects of this magnitude based there. Plus I bet they would have a far easier time selling the original idea of a site somewhere in Northern California! This may sound trivial but you are trying to attract the best and brightest minds in the world to this project and it is worth remembering that people like this generally have a large number of options open to them. Unless they have family there moving to northern Illinois is not likely to be something that will be attractive - although as a colleague of mine put it when we were both based at Fermilab: sometimes we have to suffer for our science!