Monday, August 31, 2009

getcher argonne


Spent Saturday at the Argonne National Laboratories Open House. They throw the event every few years and truck out their display posters to try to make sense out of things like material sciences and accelerators and nanoparticle design and nuclear and high energy physics.

I'd be lying if I said I understood half of what I saw.

But I did get to crawl the massive bucolic grounds of Argonne (which is surrounded by the Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve); touch part of the University of Chicago's original pile (trusting that was no longer radioactive -- although, come to think of it, that was probably naive); ooh and aah over the Gammasphere which detects gamma rays and played a bit part in Ang Lee's the Hulk; gaze in awe at cosmic particles in a cloud chamber; and came away with a deeper understanding of the physics of the yo-yo.

So there's that.


Flickr slideshow of Argonne National Lab by suttonhoo »

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