signal to background Rowing Lake Geneva; partying for peace; high-voltage scarecrow; strangely familiar time machine; an innocent bystander drowns in physics spam; indecent equation; letters; call for physics license plates; corrections. Row, row, row... Dunford has certainly had cated?’ ‘And when is the beam Monica Dunford couldn’t stop ample opportunity to learn. going to turn on?’” swaying when she finally got She has rowed crew for the There was little chatter dur- out of the boat after 15 hours, 33 University of California at ing the big race, though—just minutes, and 15 seconds of Irvine, played soccer (“horribly,” five people determined to reach hard rowing. The physicist and she claims) while living in the finish line. Every two hours, her four teammates had just Philadelphia, and run four mar- each rower would get a break to Photo courtesy of Monica Dunford won the Tour du Leman, held athons. When she’s not at the rest, eat and drink, and use the Sept. 22. Never again, she lab, she’s training. While pre- “bathroom”—a cup. thought, would she do some- paring for the Tour, “I hardly got There were 16 boats in the thing so crazy as to row around any sleep,” she says. race, 11 with all-male or mostly Lake Geneva, Switzerland—that’s Dunford rows in a crew of male crews and five more evenly 160 kilometers—in a single day. five, among whom she is the mixed teams like Dunford’s. But a few days later, fully only physicist. The others work Her boat placed tenth overall, 07 | oct/nov symmetry | volume 04 issue 08/09 recovered from the competition, in business and executive job but first among the mixed teams. she thinks she might do it again. search. The diversity of the For Dunford, it seems, there “Some people just never group makes for interesting will always be another finish line learn,” says Dunford, a University conversation during practice, looming. Right after the Tour, of Chicago Enrico Fermi she says: “They’re very inter- she was back in training. She Fellow working on the Large ested in the detector—‘Why does had a marathon coming up. Hadron Collider. it have to be so big and compli- Amber Dance 4 signal to background Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab Images courtesy of Touchstone Home Entertainment Images courtesy of Touchstone As Clark Cully watched the movie Déjà Vu, he had his own flash of déjà vu: Something about that time machine seemed oddly familiar. At left, the fictional time machine in scenes from the movie; at right, Fermilab’s CDF detector. Déjà blue of particle accelerators, and Technology. The team relies As Clark Cully watched the their raw display of wires and heavily on e-mail; at certain movie Déjà Vu with his parents, sensors, that finally caught stages of the project, they were something about the movie’s his attention and provided the sending between 50 and 100 time machine —with its bright blue feeling of evolving science he e-mails per day. wedges of metal spewing a ring was seeking. Somewhere along the thread, of wires—seemed eerily familiar. “We wanted to keep things one of the physicists mistyped As Denzel Washington very much grounded and make an e-mail address, rerouting crawled into the time machine it feel like the machine had the deluge from Ben H. Lillie, a to travel to the past, Cully come from a real laboratory,” particle theorist at the University leaped up and hit pause. “It’s Seager says. “We found some of Chicago and Argonne CDF! It’s CDF!” he shouted. fabulous references on the National Laboratory, to Ben V. Cully works as a physicist on Internet to enormous pieces of Lillie, a 29-year-old pharmaceu- the CDF experiment at Fermi equipment,” and incorporated tical sales representative and National Accelerator Laboratory. the look of those detectors into father of two in Auburn, Alabama. CDF, a three-story detector the movie prop. “The first e-mail showed up painted in classic Fermilab blue, While Cully burst with excite- in early June, and I honestly is one of the two large experi- ment at seeing the CDF in thought it was spam,” Alabama ments on the Tevatron. the movie, his family was more Ben recalls. “It looked like one Sure enough, when he subdued. of those pharmaceutical online enlarged the TV image of the After he finished jumping up purchase deals or viruses time machine, there was the and down, Cully noticed that that had nothing but charac- CDF logo on one of the wedges. his parents and sister looked ters and numbers.” “To really make that accurate confused. “They asked me, Oblivious to the error, SLAC’s a reproduction,” Cully says, “you ‘What’s CDF?’” Cully says, with Hewett and her colleagues would have had to see the obvious disappointment. “I continued their discussions of detector or the specs.” guess my family didn’t remem- ILC simulations and novel The film crew probably did. ber the tour I gave them, or SUSY parameters. “We were Production designer Chris that I’m writing my thesis on it.” wondering why we weren’t Seager says he first considered Haley Bridger getting any e-mails back from medical technology, such as an our Ben,” Hewett says, “but we i MRI scanner, as the model for You have 3Hψ new went our merry way.” 07 | oct/nov symmetry | volume 04 issue 08/09 a time machine. But the hard- messages As the paper neared its final ware seemed too small. He JoAnne Hewett’s most recent stages, the content of the visited power plants, NASA’s Jet paper is a collaboration between e-mails increased in complexity. Propulsion Laboratory, and the physicists at the Stanford “They hardly seemed like Cambridge High Energy Physics Linear Accelerator Center, the English,” says Alabama Ben. “I Laboratory looking for inspira- University of Chicago, and have a BS in business manage- tion. But it was the roundness the Massachusetts Institute of ment and a minor in computer 6 LHC Inverse Problem,” with a According to an e-mail from line citing him by name “for his Steve Haskins, a communi- good humor and patience.” cations officer for the agency, As for Alabama Ben, “I see “GEQ8PIT was originally it as the time I dabbled in parti- refused because it appeared cle physics and linear theory,” he to read 8 with PI (pie). The jokes. “The particle accelerator Special Processing Unit refuses in the garage still has a few any configuration with 8 (ate) bugs in it, but it’s getting there.” in it, if they are not sure of the Lizzie Buchen meaning, as it appears to be of a sexual connotation.” GEQ***T Haskin says Nash’s original When Tom Nash bought a new application apparently did Porsche 911 Carrera 4, he explain that the numbers and let- wanted to give it some personal ters represented Einstein’s flair. So he applied for a cus- field equation, “but it’s safe to science, so I would like to think tom license plate: GEQ8PIT. say that our technicians, not I am not a complete idiot, but “I’d never had a vanity plate being gravitational physicists, these e-mails were on such a before,” Nash says, “but I simply didn’t understand what high level I thought they had thought it might be fun. And it he meant. When it was later to be a joke. Even my computer fit perfectly!” explained in more detail, the programs have fewer symbols To his surprise, the California configuration was approved.” and characters.” Department of Motor Vehicles On Oct. 18, five months and Although the e-mails were denied his request, pronouncing nine days after his initial appli- incoherent, they seemed harm- it “offensive to good taste cation, the plates finally arrived. Document courtesy of JoAnne Hewett less, so Alabama Ben ignored and decency” and “misleading In spite of the delays, Nash is them for three weeks. “But then to some of our citizens.” happy with the outcome. “Appar- I realized that someone else—my “I was astonished,” Nash ently there had been a change clone in Chicago—was proba- recalls. “I didn’t understand how of personnel in the Special bly feeling left out,” he says. “So this could be interpreted offen- Processing Unit and my first I told them they were sending sively by even the most distorted letter was lost,” he says. “So their messages to the wrong of minds.” He immediately the DMV has no hard feelings address.” called the agency, which told him about Einstein, and I have no His attempt to clarify the sit- to submit a written appeal. hard feelings about the DMV.” uation, however, only made it So Nash, a retired Fermilab Lizzie Buchen worse. “We thought that mes- physicist and member of the sage came from our Ben,” Laser Interferometer Gravitational- Hewett says, “so it led to a huge Wave Observatory scientific flurry of e-mail messages—more collaboration, wrote to explain than 100 per day for about that the message represented a week.” Albert Einstein’s gravitational Finally, Alabama Ben field equation, G=8πT. 07 | oct/nov symmetry | volume 04 issue 08/09 explained it as clearly as possi- The equation describes how ble for the theoretical physi- the distribution of mass (stress Nash Photo courtesy of Tom cists. “I’d love to help you guys energy tensor, or T ) affects the out,” he insisted, “but I’m just curvature of space-time (G), a pharmaceutical rep in Auburn, encapsulating Einstein’s gen- Alabama, and I’m afraid this eral theory of relativity.