Coinciding conveniently with our trip, the new issue of Rolling Stone profiles Steven Chu, Obama’s Energy Secretary. (You can read a PDF here.) The Department of Energy is unquestionably a bureaucratic mess (exhibit A: the Superconducting Super Collider), and Chu says he is committed to supporting good science rather than playing politics — a refreshing change for the department, considering that one congressional science staffer told Jeff Goodell, the piece’s author, “In the past, the only qualification necessary to becoming secretary of energy was that you knew nothing about energy.” Continue reading
About the Summer of Science
During the summer of 2009, Lizzie Wade (a writer) and Nick Russell (a writer and photographer) drove 15,000 miles across America to take the pulse of American high energy physics as the Large Hadron Collider slowly rumbled to life in Europe. After visits to eight DOE national laboratories, a NASA lab, the Very Large Array and the abandoned site of the superconducting super collider, an article about the trip appeared in Symmetry Magazine. This blog serves as a space to provide detailed accounts of the lab visits, as well as broader commentary on physics and the experience of a massive road trip.Subscribe
Search
Archives
- June 2010 (2)
- May 2010 (1)
- March 2010 (1)
- November 2009 (1)
- October 2009 (3)
- September 2009 (1)
- July 2009 (3)
- June 2009 (7)
Labs Visited
- Argonne National Laboratory
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
- The Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- The Very Large Array
Like Minds
- acclerators Advanced Photon Source AEC America ANL APS Argonne Argonne National Laboratory astronomy bats biology bob dylan brookhaven Department of Energy detectors DOE energy Fermilab foil high energy physics history ILC International Linear Collider Large Hadron Collider Lawrence Berkeley LHC life sciences light source Los Alamos machines Manhattan Project MiniBooNE MINOS Museum of Jurassic Technology National Laboratories national synchrotron light source neutrinos nsls nuclear physics nuclear weapons particle accelerators particle beams particle physics photography Physics quark gluon plasma radio astronomy RHIC road trips Rolling Stone science science writing Soudan SSC Steven Chu summerofscience Superconducting Super Collider supersymmetry synchrotron Very Large Array VLA wakefield acceleration zero gradient synchrotron
Meta
Summer of Science 