Ryan Schultz and Kris Anderson had a problem: how to inspect a window in a pipe that carries a powerful particle beam, 40 feet below ground and 100 feet down a narrow tunnel.
When Sal Rappoccio, a postdoctoral researcher from Johns Hopkins University, joined the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment in mid-2007, he did what any newcomer would do. He tried to start his analysis. It did not go well.
Forty members of the Society for Sedimentary Geology drove down Loop Road, passed through the Sector 30 gate, and arrived on the north side of the klystron gallery.
Seeing is easy. We open our eyes, and there the world is–in starlight or sunlight, still or in motion, as far as the Pleiades or as close as the tips of our noses.
They had braved Parisian catacombs, gloomy dungeons, and shipwrecks. Yet as the elevator dropped 360 feet into a cavernous hall at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, uncertainty flickered across the faces of the globe-trotting television crew.
