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.
One of my favorite scenes in The Big Bang Theory involves the two main characters, Leonard and Sheldon, trying to move a large, flat box up two flights of stairs. Faced with no equipment and little upper-body strength, Leonard declares, “We are physicists!
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.
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.
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.
