Rebecca's Trip Update

[beccastareyes]

Well, we managed to get on the road to Chicago at 3:30 on Friday without a hitch and managed to make it to Aurora, Illinois at midnight. We then checked in and settled into the rooms -- our entire group had six rooms (3 male, one female, one for the sponsor, and one for one of the members and his SO).
On Saturday, a bunch of us went out to breakfast, then met Dr. Gay, our sponsor in the lobby. We got lost in suburbia when we had to pick up another member who lived in the area -- there are pictures of us turning aorund in a graveyard that was not designed to have a van in it. But, we finally made it to Fermilab.
Fermilab was frickin awesome. For those non-physics students, Fermilab is a particle accelerator -- basically it speeds up particles to very fast and smashes them into other particles. This releases a lot of energy, and sometimes weird things are created from the energy. This is interesting because it tells us about what the universe is like on the subatomic scale -- pretty much our only way about finding about stuff that doens't exist in nature on this scale.
Anyways, this place has a lot of equipment -- it was very surrealistic. The control room looks like something out of a space movie, and the equipment looks like a mad scientist's/alien abductor's lab. Well, if you ignore the fact that on the surface there is a reconstructed prarie complete with buffallo.
We learned about the discovery of the top quark -- quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. There are three families of quarks and leptons. The conventional one has the up and down quarks (which are what protons and neutrons (read: normal matter) are made of) the electron and the neutrino (more on the neutrino later). There are two other sets of subatomic particles (one with the muon, charm and strange quarks, and the muon neutrino and one with the top and bottom quarks, the tau particle and the tau neutrino) which are not normally found on Earth and whihc are really only different in mass. Anyways, the top quark is a very hefty subatomic particle, so it was very difficult to find -- the guys who did find it first got a Nobel Prize.
We also learned about a project to study neutrinos by sending them to Minnisota. First, a note -- neutrinos are featherweight (we don't know how mcuh they weigh -- heck, until recently, we thought they weighted nothing) uncharged particles that can go through a mile of lead without realizing it. Millions are streaming through your body right now from the sun -- even if the sun is down, they can easily pass through the Earth. In order to detect them you need very sensitive equipment, a collection of very uniform atoms, and a way of cutting out all the other subatomic garbage you get from space -- the favored method is usually big tanks of ultra-pure water/chlorine buried underground.
Now, most particles in Fermilab are shuttled to and fro underground using maget-lined tunnels. This is, shall we say, not feasible for this project. So, the decision was made to send them straight through the Earth. However, a group at the University of Wisconsin found out that those eeeebiiiil scientists were going to be sending particles under thier fair state and, instea dof looking up what a neutrino was, they demanded that the Fermilab people submit an enviromental impact statement to the government. We all found that very funny.
After lunch at McDonalds, where I discovered I didn't hate the salads, we went to Argonne National Labs. Here we ran into a problem. See, some classified research is done at Argonne, so we all had to be checked out. They were especially careful about non-citizens, and Ryo, our token foreigner, had to submit an extra form -- which got lost in the wilds of cyberspace. We spent an hour while the military types determined that Ryo wasn't going to sell our secrets of X-ray production to the Japanese. We were just lucky he wasn't from a country that was threatening -- my dad said they wouldn't let some of his Chinese grad students into national labs.
So, anyways, we got to see how to make a lot of X-rays at the Advanced Photon Source, and listened to scienists talk about pet projects. We also got to see Dr. Gay take off on one of the tricycles they use for transporting materials.
We went to Chicago for dinner, and I had pizza. After that, AJ, Neil and I looked for a used bookstore Dr. Gay recommened to us. We didn't find it, but we found an overprised new bookstore, where I wrote down titles I wanted to read. We also saw Enrico Fermi's (a famous scientist who built the first nuclear reactor) house.
I went to bed early, but the rest of the club went bowlign in Aurora. Thus, I was the onyl one awake the next day when half of the group went hom early and the other half went to the Alder Planetarium.
The Alder Planetarum is frickin cool. We saw two shows. One was in the first planetarium dome in the Western Hemisphere and was pretty standard -- we watched a presentation on the star legends of Africa. The next one was in the digital auditorium and was interactive... we got to pilot a spacecraft in a simulation of Europa's (A moon of Jupiter) oceans and in Mars's canyons. Of course, being a childish audience, we crashed the spacecraft into the ocean floor and into a rover on Mars. The shows itself wasn't impressive save for the graphics -- they were tres awesome. I also got an umbrella from the gift shop -- mine broke in the last rainstorm.
The dirve back was boring, except for the fact that I never want to be in a van with Cece when she hasn't had sleep ever again. I also should have not listened to my CDs until after dark -- I got sick of them, and people were more tolerable before being in the car for four hours.

In other news, Ben has taught me to play Yu-gi-oh! cards.