Amanda Gray's Photos

It is here in the highrise that the wine and cheese talks are held on fridays. It is here in the highrise on the 3rd floor that I watched the most god-awful (but not quite the most sexist) safety video evaaah. It is here in the highrise that the theorists work, and their floor is, necessarily, covered with blackboards, because whiteboards interfere with one's ability to generate abstract concepts. It is here in the highrise on the 15th floor that I should have, could have taken the most awesome photos of the main ring and the linear accelerators. But I didn't, so you will have to take my word for it -- seeing Fermi is one of the most lovely things on the planet. Definitely an Oh brave new world! moment.

It doesn't look like much up close. Underneath that mound of earth -- that berm for those of you who've done long-distance precision shooting and know about the need for reliable backstops -- is "the Tev." The Tevatron itself, the tunnels in which two beams of particles rush around and around until they're crossed in the detectors (D0 and CDF, the rival experiments), have all that earth piled on top to stop the radiation.

Smack dab in the middle of the prairie is an old bubble chamber. In the same way, Fermilab is a national laboratory smack dab in the middle of the suburbs. It's wacky.

The funny thing (don't tell my advisor, okay?) is that at the beginning of the summer I actually thought particle accelerators still used these things. Fortunately, I kept my mouth shut until I learned better... *whew*! Hopefully I've shown enough improvement this summer that no one's going to hold that misconception against me.

This is so cool that I had to take another picture of it.

For posterity's sake, here's a picture of the grad student who kindly took me on a tour of Fermi on my first afternoon there. I got to see the new inner layer of the detector that's going in to the D0 experiment soon, and some of the chips they used to make it, and also some random neutrino experiment hardware they've been putting together and running. And this terribly cool old piece of equipment! And the village, and such.

I got so soaked walking around downtown Naperville, but I wasn't the only one. People acutally wear those clear plastic ponchos in the midwest! You know, the ones we Seattlites sell to our tourists... who are from the midwest.