Chicago Trip, September 2007

Thanks to Gail Haynes for organizing a great weekend!

Sorry for the brevity of the explanations, but you know how many words they say each picture is worth!

A clear Chicago sky over the Field Museum - about as rare as the Cubs winning the pennant.

T-rex Sue, in fine form - though all the staff were happy to point out the disfiguring bone disease that attacked the leg on the right of the picture.

We went for dinner at Harry Caray's. We thought it would be interesting use our exquisite timing to see what happy Cubs fans look like. . . as rare as blue skies over Chicago . . .

The main office building at Fermilab is Wilson Hall, modeled after the Saint-Pierre Cathedral of Beauvais. The freestanding concrete towers are connected by an immense glass-enclosed atrium.

The atrium between the towers is bright, lush, and inviting. All of the offices have windows to either the outside or the atrium.

A 200 foot long Foucault pendulum swings in the atrium.

This is the new control center that will able to work with CERN remotely when their new super-giant particle accelerator is completed.

From the top of Wilson Hall looking north, a seemingly infinite series of pi-shaped electrical towers recedes in the distance. The arched building on the left is one of the stationary targets for the accelerator. Another tangent off of the accelerator ring shoots neutrinos through the earth to a detector in the Sudan mine in Minnesota. The "Fermilab Blue" buildings were once all different primary colors spread about like a child's blocks.

The Fermilab Logo design arose from the shapes of two types of magnets commonly used in high energy particle beamlines today: quadrupoles and dipoles. The four-pronged shape represents a quadrupole, used for focusing (and defocusing) the beam of charged particles. Ideally, the shape of the magnetic field lines replicates the the four-pronged shape. The two intersecting straight lines represent the aperture of a dipole magnet, which steers the beam. Viewing Wilson Hall along with its image in the Reflecting Pond offers a stylized version of the Fermilab Logo. (I'd like you to think that I know that, but I just copied it off Fermilab's site.)

The main acclerator ring is four miles in circumference. The lake within the ring encircles one of many nature preserve areas on Fermilab's grounds.

This Van de Graff acclerator on steriods, the Cockcroft-Walton accelerator, is what gets the protons initially going through a potential difference of 750,000 Volts. The enclosing Faraday cage is there for -- well you know what it's there for.

Even Fermilab uses Vernier equipment?

In the CDF building, adjacent to the ring, and one of two sites for particle collisions and detector installations, we saw some not in-use-detectors, including this huge scintillation detector. I know that Quark-net participants have seen the kinds of clear plastic light pipes that get light from the detection locations to the photomultipliers on top.

I think every science building needs a staircase like this. Fermilab abounds with clever symbolic uses of shapes and forms that any scientifically literate person can appreciate.

Our fearless band of explorers in front of a bubble chamber lens near the Leon Lederman education center. In addition to all of the cool physics going on here, there's a lot of wildlife conservation, preservation, and study ocurring here. It is definitely a place to see, explore and take your students.

Only after I got back home did I learn from a colleague that American Science and Surplus is right next to Fermilab. Include a trip there on your next trip as well.

Mark Schober

When: Friday Sep. 28 - Sunday Sep. 30, 2007
Where: Chicago: Downtown Museums and Fermi National Accelerator Lab
RSVP: Gail Haynes, Home
Please contact Gail no later than September 1st so that final preparations can be made.

Leave: 5:00 Friday Sept 28th. Carpool location TBD.
Stay: Comfort Inn--Downers Grove
   Cost of Stay two nights-$163.99/room
Saturday: Visit downtown museums
    
Sunday: Visit Fermi National Accelerator Lab
   Special Extended Tour (approx 3 hours) before lunch and return trip.