Signal to Background

signal to background

Origin of the (classiﬁed) barn; meet the shoemobile; creative ways to use symmetry; birds at Fermilab; scientists playing Indiana Jones; battle of the boxes; Late Show with Lederman; letters.

One big step for safety It looks like a simple silver trailer, but it’s more like a shoe store on wheels. Mike Sitarz pulls his metal trailer, better known among Fermilab employees as the “shoemobile,” behind the Technical Division industrial buildings at 8 a.m. every Tuesday. He stays until 4 p.m., fitting employees with safety shoes required for their jobs. Sitarz’s store, Knippen Shoes, located in Wheaton, Illinois, Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab is contracted by Fermilab’s Environmental Safety & Health Hitting the broad decided “Manley” was too long, Section to make weekly visits. side of a (classified) and then, as the authors put it Inside the carpeted trailer, barn in the Physics Today article to: stacks of cardboard boxes line In the luminosity lexicon, a “‘John’ was considered, but the walls and fitting chairs picobarn is one trillionth (10-12) was discarded because of the await customers. Sitarz, who’s of a barn, and a femtobarn is use of the term for purposes been making the trip to Fermi- one quadrillionth (10-15) of a other than as the name of a lab for 11 years, carries about barn… but what’s a barn? The person. The rural background of 350 pairs of shoes, ranging distinctive and amusing term one of the authors then led to from Skechers to Red Wings. originated with two Purdue the bridging of the gap between Employees required to wear University physicists working the ‘John’ and the ‘barn.’ This special work shoes receive on the Manhattan Project in immediately seemed good, and a footwear request signed by 1942–and it was classified further it was pointed out that a their supervisor detailing the information by the US govern- cross section of 10-24 cm2 for safety features that are needed. ment until after World War II. nuclear processes was really as The most common require- A History of Physics at big as a barn. Such was the ments are for nonathletic, Purdue (Gartenhaus, Tubis, birth of the ‘barn.’” leather, ankle-high shoes with Cassidy, and Bray) cites the Because of the need for steel-toe protection, Sitarz July 1972 issue of Physics Today communicating project infor- says. Other jobs just require in which Marshall Halloway mation as secretly as possible shoes with the capacity to pro- and Charles Baker write of by telephone, the term “barn” tect those who work with tossing around ideas over din- was immediately classified. electricity. Fermilab will pay up ner until arriving at “barn” to Halloway and Baker wrote an to $85 per pair, and if an describe the typical nuclear internal report in 1944 (“Note cross section of 10-24 cm2, the on the Origin of the Term ‘Barn’” effective target area that a (LAMS 523), September 1944),

nuclear particle represents in and Los Alamos issued a report symmetry | volume 03 issue 01 february 06 a collision. Dining in the Purdue after the war in 1947 (“Origin Memorial Union, back in of the Term ‘barn’” (LAMS 523), Lafayette, Indiana, Halloway 5 March 1947). But the term and Baker dismissed “Oppen- “barn” wasn’t ofﬁcially de- heimer” and “Bethe” as candi- classiﬁed by the government dates, then considered John until 1948. It is now used across

Manley, director of the Purdue nuclear and particle physics. Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab group at Los Alamos. They Mike Perricone

4 employee chooses a pair over that limit, they’re expected to cover the additional cost. On what Sitarz calls the “free wall” about 40 pairs of shoes are displayed, all $85 or less. The hardest part is finding the pair that fits best, Sitarz says. “Steel-toed shoes are even more difficult because if you don’t get the proper size, they’ll kill you,” he says. Employees don’t have to purchase their shoes from Sitarz, but that’s often the easiest option, says Rafael Coll, who coordinates Fermilab’s safety shoe pro- gram. “It’s convenient because people don’t have to miss work,” he says. “If they go out to town, it could take a couple hours. But here, they’re in Photo: Dawn Stanton and out in less than a half hour.” Kendra Snyder Seeking the The Christmas Bird Count SymmeTree elusive… snipe? is part of a larger Audubon Tired of the usual holiday dec- Instead of spin they have lift. Society effort that takes place orations, SLAC librarian Lesley They interact via songs. And throughout North and South Wolf created the first ever they come in far more than just America from mid-December “SymmeTree” last November. three colors. to early January. Tens of thou- “I didn’t want to put up the plas- A total of 277 bird species sands of birders participate in tic tree one more time,” she has been recorded at Fermilab the annual count, which started says. “For the library it made since surveys began in the in 1900. The Fermilab count sense to create a new one mid-eighties. Spring and fall started in 1976. This year’s total from a hefty journal, so I turned are peak seasons to find for Fermilab’s 6800 acres to symmetry.” Fashioned from migratory species, while many was 2931 birds representing 49 two copies of the magazine, birds call the facility home species. Fermilab counters Wolf’s creation, inspired by the year-round. And though the recorded a number of Yellow- origami in the November issue, birds of Fermilab may not solve rumped warblers, Cooper’s delighted library patrons for the puzzles of the universe, hawks, American robins, and several weeks before she pre- people still come to look for Mourning doves. Denis Kania sented it to the symmetry staff them, even in the subzero (top photo, far left), Area-1 as a holiday gift. temperatures of a US Mid- leader for the Fermilab-Batavia Kelen Tuttle west winter. count group, noted that while The annual Christmas Bird the count of robins was high, Count at Fermilab was a com- there were fewer Canada munity effort involving members geese this year. Other less of several local birding clubs, common sightings included including the DuPage Birding Eastern bluebirds, Lapland Club, which organized the longspurs, and a Lesser scaup. event. Fermilab physicist Peter As for snipe? Kasper again joined the CBC “Our first bird of the day volunteer ranks this year, as he was a snipe,” says Kania. His symmetry | volume 03 issue 01 february 06 has every year since 1987. group found the Wilson’s snipe “When I’m here in the Chicago (named after Scottish-born area, I do all my birding at ornithologist Alexander Wilson) Fermilab,” says Kasper, a life- foraging in a marsh near long bird watcher who maintains Wilson Hall (Fermilab’s main the well-known Birds of Fermilab building, named after founding Web site. director Robert Wilson).

Photo: Diana Rogers Dawn Stanton

5 signal to background

astrolabes. All three revealed large units to get the most the same result, showing that computing power for its dollar. the Adler astrolabe is consistent “Cabinet units can cost ten with materials and workman- times more than their PC ship of the period, and the counterparts,” says Charles Harvard instrument was of much Boeheim, assistant director of more recent manufacture. Scientific Computing and And an international team Computing Services at SLAC. of archaeologists and physi- “Because each collision in a On the trails of cists from the University of particle accelerator is an inde- Indiana Jones Chicago Oriental Institute used pendent event, it’s possible to Innovative 21st century tech- high-resolution x-ray fluores- farm out analysis to individual nology at Argonne National cence data to analyze the PCs and save on computing Laboratory is taking research- composition of a figurine from costs.” ers back to the 19th century, the Amuq Valley in central SLAC currently runs about the 16th century, and even the Turkey, and dated it to the 3000 processors in its comput- third millennium BCE. beginning of the third millen- ing center and receives large Scientists and historians nium BCE. The researchers shipments of new computers using the Advanced Photon found the figurine to be every six to twelve months. It Source at Argonne, a Depart- an early example of the use of takes six people just to ment of Energy laboratory, metallic alloys, made from arrange the logistics of are finding that the most bril- copper and tin. unpacking each box, rolling the liant x-rays in the Western Catherine Foster, Argonne computers into the building, Hemisphere can reveal internal National Laboratory setting up the racks that will details about relics without house them, hooking them up damaging them. Battle of the boxes to power, loading necessary For example, researchers Last October, the front of the software, and connecting them found massive amounts of SLAC computing center to the network. On average, lead–a “toxic overdose”–in looked like an elaborate chil- this process takes a little over bone fragments and hair dren’s war game in progress. a month, but the first few days belonging to 19th century com- Ad hoc piles of polystyrene, create the detritus of unpack- poser Ludwig von Beethoven, plastic, wooden pallets, and ing that is gradually cleaned up confirming the cause of his cardboard created an image and recycled where possible. chronic debilitating illness. The of bunkers and trenches in “People will stand around researchers used micro-imaging a plastic post-industrial land- and gawk at the unloading to look at the distribution of scape. Within a few days, process,” Boeheim says. “Then lead in and on both the bone the scene was gone but it will they expect the computers to fragments and hair. reappear in the near future. be up and running the next The APS was also used to The piles of packaging day. They don’t realize all that study two astrolabes, instru- grew as workers unpacked a goes on inside the computing ments that were used to study new shipment of 353 Sun building for weeks afterwards. the positions of the stars computers. Like many labs, But if people don’t know we’re before the telescope was in- SLAC buys hundreds of indi- here, we’re doing our jobs right.” vented. The instruments were vidual PCs instead of a few Kelen Tuttle from different collections, Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and Harvard University, but each bore the same name and date, suggesting that at least

one was a forgery. symmetry | volume 03 issue 01 february 06 Three different tests were done at the APS–ﬂuorescence analysis to determine the ele- ment composition; diffraction analysis to determine the crys- talline texture of the astrolabes;

and radiography to study the David Harris, SLAC Photos: Melinda Lee, thickness of each plate of the

6 “Ways to Know You Have Won the Nobel Prize” Hosting the “Late Show with Leon,” Nobel laureate Leon Lederman shared with high school students his top four- teen ways to know you have won the Nobel Prize: 14. Your telephone rings at 6 a.m. and someone with a

Swedish accent invites you to Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab a party. 13. You meet a lot of impor- 4. Physicists have three Democretos heralding his tant people; some are so rich other prizes they can win: one discovery of atoms. It is hand- they have unlisted telephone for physicists who can count written, signed by Democretos companies. and one for physicists who himself, and is clearly dated: 12. Your fame makes you cannot count. Aug. 2, 467 BC. such an extrovert that you now 3. Your psychiatrist–all 1. Two atoms are walking stare at other people’s shoes Nobelists have them–diagnosed down the street when one when talking to them. that you are in love with your says, “Help! I think I lost an 11. You use your prestige umbrella. [Looking up, Leon electron.” Asks his friend: “Are to explain to the judge that you Lederman said:] How stupid you sure?” “Yes, I’m positive!” couldn’t possibly have been can they get? I like and driving at 60 mph when you’d respect my umbrella, but love? Streaming video of the show is only been driving for 15 minutes. 2. Your Nobel colleagues at http://vmsstreamer1.fnal. 10. On the seventh Nobel are excited by the discovery of gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/ convocation the Queen greets the original document written LateShow/ you as an “old friend.” by the Greek physicist 9. Laureates are arrogant, but they don’t want to be. You overheard one saying, “Lord, please forgive the sin of arro- Letters gance, and Lord, by arrogance I mean the following…” Another artifact 8. Your spouse orders you In response to our story “Artifact: Relativator,” SLAC physicist to take out the garbage. and director emeritus W.K.H. “Pief” Panofsky provided us “Woman!” you say, “How dare with another type of circular slide rule he has had in his desk you!” Then she calls three since the late 1970s (photo). While the Relativator was designed laureates, and they all take out to calculate values useful to Einstein’s special theory of the garbage! relativity, this Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer can be used to 7. Mysterious but passionate calculate the effects of a nuclear bomb as a function of love letters arrive in your mail- the distance from the explosion or yield of the bomb. Panofsky box, addressed to “occupant.” says he often found the device quick and easy to use even 6. Testifying in a lawsuit, you though the same calculations could be performed more pre- claim you are unquestionably cisely with a computer. Images of the reverse side of the the world’s greatest theoretical device and of the pamphlet that came with the device are physicist. When later confronted online at www.symmetrymagazine.org by colleagues, you explain:

“I was under oath.” Correction symmetry | volume 03 issue 01 february 06 5. Nobelists are supposed In the December 2005/January 2006 issue of symmetry, the story to know everything. You ﬁnd “Graduate school gourmet” incorrectly identiﬁed Jonathan yourself chairing two advisory Bagger’s association with the High Energy Physics Advisory committees: one on the preva- Panel. Bagger served as co-chair of a HEPAP subpanel. lence of measles in Guatemala and the other on income tax Letters can be submitted via laws in North Dakota. [email protected]