Physics Buzz

Unfortunate news out of Pittsburgh this week. The nearly 80-year-old, long defunct Westinghouse Atom Smasher has been toppled . The felled Atom Smasher in Forest Hills, Penn. Image: WTAE Pittsburgh The five-story steel bulb was the first industrial particle accelerator ever built, and was the most powerful in the world when it was completed in 1937. Its unusual bulb shape is because it is an old Van de Graaff style electrostatic accelerator. The steel dome would build up a huge electrical charge, repelling positively charged ions down a beam tube onto an experiment  or detector. It's a design that today is mostly obsolete, but a few modern accelerators use a version of the technology . The Physics Buzz team visited the site in November of 2013 , and discovered more about it's history and design. It's not even the only one left over from the 1930s either.

This is the first sample of plutonium big enough to be seen by the naked eye. Probably. There's a sticker on the side that claiming it's the first plutonium sample large enough to be weighed, but the papers documenting the origins of this atomic artifact have long since disappeared. Scientists at Berkeley have had to rely on nuclear forensics to substantiate whether this radioactive fleck was really produced in 1942 by the physicist who first discovered the element, Glenn Seaborg. "I am 99 percent sure that's what this is," said Eric Norman , a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "[But] we can't prove it unless you find Seaborg's DNA or his fingerprints on it." The plutonium fleck, magnified. Image: Eric Norman If this little radioactive fleck is actually the sample it claims to be, which seems likely, its historical significance is huge. Plutonium was one of the very first artificial elements create

Sixty-nine years ago today, a huge fireball rose slowly above the New Mexican desert. The Trinity test signified that for the first time, physicists working on the Manhattan Project had successfully split the atom and built the first nuclear bomb. Photo by Jack Aeby The Atomic Heritage Foundation's   Voices of the Manhattan Project website is an unparalleled trove of historic interviews with the veterans of the project. There's collected historic recordings of everyone from the heads of the project like physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves , to more recent interviews with the people that history often overlooks, like the secretaries, technicians and people who just lived nearby. On this week's podcast, we spoke with the founder and lead interviewer at the foundation, and heard some of the lesser known stories of the Manhattan Project. It's an amazing peek inside America's secret cities of World War II.

According to recent research  (and some of my own calculations) sitting in your living room for an hour yields roughly the same dose of radiation as eating half a banana. A team in China working on improving the way scientists measure a room's radioactivity calculated how much radiation an average room gives off. Everything emits a trace amount of radiation. Bananas , dirt, seagulls, Abe Vigoda and coffee tables are all to some degree a very tiny bit radioactive. It's because radioactive elements like potassium-40, uranium-238 and thorium-232 are ubiquitous throughout the planet's surface, and get absorbed into different materials through various natural processes. They're part of what makes up the Earth's "background radiation."

The derelict Westinghouse Atom Smasher,  one of the oldest (and biggest) artifacts from the dawn of the Nuclear Age, awaits its fate atop a hill outside Pittsburgh.  The world’s first industrial particle accelerator sits rusting away in the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills, its future unclear. It was cutting edge technology when it was built in 1937, but when the company retired it in 1958, it was a relic of an obsolete technology. Six months ago, a D.C. real estate developer with a penchant for history bought the site and has been doing what he can to preserve the giant silver teardrop. If all goes according to plan, he’ll convert the old atom smasher into an education center while turning the rest of the property into rental units.

On this week's podcast, I visit Brookhaven National Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a machine that recreates the conditions of the universe a microsecond after the Big Bang. I got a chance to meet the scientists while they were taking data, and see what they see. However that also meat that I didn't get a chance to see any of the detectors in person because they were busy doing what they were designed to do, detecting particle collisions. An ariel view of Brookhaven National Labs, with the two-mile-long RHIC accelerator tunnel highlighted and the STAR and PHENIX detectors marked. Inside, there are two beam tubes running parallel to each other but in opposite directions. Ions shoot around the beam tubes and collide with each other at the detectors where the tubes cross. 

During the early days of the Atomic Age , it seemed like a healthy dose of nuclear power could make everything better. From 1945 until the late sixties, a bold new world powered by the unlimited cheap energy of the atom seemed perpetually just around the corner. Image: A is for Atom , Sutherland Productions Of course, reality fell a bit short of expectations, but it wasn't for a lack of trying. There were some pretty outlandish experiments that went on, often at secret labs in far-away places. In the middle of it all was the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission , now the Department of Energy . They were in charge of the country's nuclear materials, and played a central role in all of the big atomic experiments of the time. Some of the experiments got pretty extreme.

There's a derelict atom smasher nestled in the middle of suburban Washington DC. The old Atomic Physics Observatory sits in the middle of the  Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism , a scientific research campus in the city's Chevy Chase neighborhood.  The APO was named and likewise designed to look like an astronomical observatory, in hopes that the nearby residents wouldn't put up too much of a fuss when the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism built a particle accelerator in the well-off suburb.  When it was built in 1938, it was one of the most powerful particle accelerators in the the world. Less than a year after it was first turned on, it played an important role in confirming the  nuclear fission  of uranium, the discovery that directly lead to the atomic bomb. Today, it's mostly used to store garden tools. The maintenance staff let us look around at what's left of the old machine.

Ever wondered what life was like for scientists at a lab that didn't officially exist? Physicist Robert Serber soaks up some rays at Los Alamos. (image: Harold Agnew)  In 1943 the United States Army established a top secret research facility in Los Alamos New Mexico to build the world's first atomic bomb. It was the greatest assembly of the physicists the world had ever seen. Hundreds of the country's top scientists came together to win World War II by splitting the atom. Early morning on July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project detonated Trinity , the world's first atomic bomb.

So what exactly was in all those old fallout shelters?  Durin g the 1950s and 1960s, the Cold War was at its height and the fear of atomic warfare with the Soviet Union was  terrifyingly palpable. In response,  the United States Office of Civil Defense stocked thousands of fallout shelters in the basements of public schools, city halls, apartment buildings and factories with supplies to protect citizens from the radioactive aftermath of a nuclear attack that never came. But what did those rows and rows of storage boxes that everybody hoped they would never need actually contain? In addition to lots of survival crackers, barrels of drinking water and medical supplies, these big public fallout shelters were stocked equipment  to monitor the surrounding radiation. However, starting in the late 1970s and early '80s, the federal government stopped supporting the shelter program. S torage budgets shrank, equipment started becoming obsolete and  millions of pieces of equipment

This week’s podcast tells the story of Operation Crossroads , the first nuclear weapons tests after the end of World War II. During much of the ensuing cold war, a lot of physics research was dominated by the need to develop new and better nuclear weapons for the military. Physicists at the Manhattan Project in New Mexico built and tested the first atom bomb in 1945. Today nine nations possess nuclear weapons and collectively have conducted 2,083 tests since that first early morning explosion.  To put that in perspective, artist Isao Hashimoto made this short video of all atomic weapons tests up until 1998. It doesn’t include the most recent member of the nuclear weapons club, North Korea, but you get the idea.

In case you haven't heard, the massive Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland had its first proton collisions over the weekend after shutting down last September. This means that the world's largest most complicated machine is now back, and ready to search for the hypothesized Higgs boson , the particle theorized to give matter its mass. The LHC is on record as the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Not only that, it really is the world's largest and most complex machine. When running at full power it shoots lead ions around its 27 km long track at almost the speed of light. The ions collide with such energy, that new particles are created under conditions similar to just moments after the Big Bang. It’s the hope of physicists around the world that one of the particles that flies off into the detectors is that hard to pin down Higgs boson. Author Bill Bryson visited the collider a few weeks ago while it still under repair. He spoke to CERN

I remember how excited I was when Google Maps first came into existence. I would seize anyone who seemed to show a particle of interest, sit them down in front of my computer, and click madly on the little square until I could discern my own house. Well, Google Maps has grown up quite a bit since then. Now I can satisfy my need to stalk my own house by flying straight home on the wings of Google Earth. When that gets boring, I can zoom way out and give the earth a spin, as if it were an old-fashioned globe, or turn it upside down to check on Antarctica. Google Earth is also a great way to tour big science in all its glory. How, you ask? Well, first download the program . Then make a list of your dream destinations —Fermilab, CERN, KEK in Japan, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory—and fly to each one. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory makes for a splendid aerial shot, even more impressive than the giant rings of Fermilab's Tevatron or the LHC. The two-mile-long linear acc

WASHINGTON — For the first time, physicists have photographed the structure of an atom down to its electrons. The pictures, soon to be published in the journal Physical Review B, show the detailed images of a single carbon atom's electron cloud, taken by Ukrainian researchers at the Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology in Kharkov, Ukraine. This is the first time scientists have been able to see an atom's internal structure directly. Since the early 1980s, researchers have been able to map out a material's atomic structure in a mathematical sense, using imaging techniques. Quantum mechanics states that an electron doesn't exist as a single point, but spreads around the nucleus in a cloud known as an orbital. The soft blue spheres and split clouds seen in the images show two arrangements of the electrons in their orbitals in a carbon atom. The structures verify illustrations seen in thousands of chemistry books because they match established quantum mechani

People often say that standing outside on a clear, starry night gives you a sense of scale, of how tiny you are compared to the vastness of the universe. But it's tough to really comprehend just how vanishingly miniscule we are. We're so used to living in inches and feet and miles—or centimeters, meters, and kilometers—that it's nigh impossible to wrap our minds around the enormous distances between us and other objects in the universe, even ones we can see, like the sun and moon. Is there any way to comprehend it? That may be a tall order, but folks at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia have come up with a wonderful, creative approach in a project called MASS. MASS stands for Metro Atlanta Solar System , a model of the solar system scaled down by a factor of 150 million to fit within Atlanta's city limits. Agnes Scott's gorgeous Bradley Observatory is the center, specifically the circular stone courtyard in front of it. The courtyard's diameter is about

A screenshot from Phil Owen's winning video "Origin of Mass" Phil Owen might just be the envy of every geek on earth. In November, the twenty-five-year-old will be flying from Australia to Geneva, Switzerland, courtesy of CERN. There he'll have a front-row seat to possibly the most anticipated event in scientific history—the startup of the Large Hadron Collider. And that's just the beginning. As the winner of a video contest held by the collaboration that works on ATLAS , the LHC's flagship detector, Owen will be the project's multimedia intern , with the opportunity to document those first moments in gorgeous 3D. "I had some other plans for next year, but I think I'll put them off," he says. "It's an amazing opportunity." Owen , who was born in the US, is finishing up his bachelor's degree in information technology at Monash University in Australia. While studying he's been working on medical visualization pr

You might have read it in Nature News , Starts with a Bang , or Science : physicists have discovered magnetic monopoles. Sort of. Positive and negative charges are happily independent, but north and south poles always come in twos. As the textbook example goes, cut a bar magnet in half, and you'll get two smaller bar magnets—you can never isolate one from another. Monopoles—a lone north or south pole—simply don't exist. Or so I was told when I first heard about monopoles, in my first college course on electromagnetism. I heard about them for the second time from Shou-Cheng Zhang, a condensed-matter physicist who studies exotic phases of matter. He seemed to have a rather different opinion. As my hand struggled to keep up with the interview, it occurred to me that Stanford clearly thought very highly of Zhang; sunlight flooded through a large window into the generously proportioned office, which was located just next door to one of the department's Nobel laureates.

Today was the last day of our beloved Crazy Laser Lady, aka LaserFest coordinator. Although she has moved on to pursue her career as a science journalist, she left us with a library of memorable quotes such as: "Is that a tarantula made of paramagnetic putty on your desk?" One floor below the former desk of the Crazy Laser is the Center for the History of Physics in the Neils Bohr Library . This center contains the oral histories of 500 physicists. These oral histories are recorded interviews with George Gamow, John Archibald Wheeler, Werner Heisenberg and many more. The center is working to transcribe and digitize the recordings. It is interesting to hear many of the physicists recalling their childhood memories as well as their reasons for majoring in physics rather than engineering. From Gamow's popular book, Mr. Tompkins in Paperback First let us listen to (or read) George Gamow and his wife sing about the battle between the expanding universe theory and the st

The cover of a recent issue of the avant-garde art magazine Esopus features a beautiful black-and-white image of a Crockroft–Walton generator , a familiar sight, perhaps, to deep nerds, especially those who grew up in the "age of the atom." This particular instance is from Japanese particle physics lab KEK , though the magazine also features old equipment from Fermilab . The generator was the workhorse of particle physics from the 1930s, when it was invented, into the 50s and 60s, creating the high voltages necessary to accelerate particles to high energies. In his essay accompanying the images, photographer Stanley Greenberg quotes Art Institute of Chicago art historian James Elkins : "Particle physics images can easily be taken as art, provided they are interpreted wholly in the light of nonscientific art-world criteria." With that in mind, Greenberg also includes actual bubble chamber film, the whimsically analogue "data storage mechanism" used

Experimentation is the essence of science. Checking fact against theory is truly what makes science great. Sometimes though either the theory hasn't evolved far enough to predict everything, or there's too many variables to accurately predict the result. But you really really want to see what happens, so you go and do it any way. I like to call this the "poke it with a stick and see what happens" scientific method. Such is the tale of the Starfish Prime nuclear test in 1962. Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the darkest days of the cold war, the military was testing nuclear weapons all the time. After leaving the old proofing grounds in Nevada , the military started testing them on small islands far out in the Pacific Ocean . After a while the military started itching to see what might happen if they detonated some of these nukes in space. megaton nuclear bomb to a Thor rocket , blasted it into space and pressed "detonate" when it reached 250