How many CDs are in the box? "100," a child guessed. "1000," said another. The answer was 2000, the equivalent of just 0.1 percent of the database capabilities at SLAC. "Imagine 2 million CDs in your bedroom."
Several US Department of Energy laboratories, including SLAC and Fermilab, gave 600 Chicago-area 11-13 year-olds a glimpse of the science of the future on October 14, 2004. The What's Next: Future Science for Future Scientists fair at Navy Pier featured exhibits intended to interest and amaze. Sponsored by the Department of Energy, and featuring DOE laboratories and industry partners, the program strives to retain students' interest in the sciences beyond the junior high school years.
SLAC contributed "High Speed Data Transfer Will Revolutionize Your Lives," an exhibit about the large and fast database it has developed. Along with impressing the students with a large box of CDs and an illustration showing a CD stack spanning the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, the exhibit included a large plasma screen with superimposed popular movies in high quality. In comparison to how long it takes for one streaming video to download over a DSL line, SLAC's speed of data transfer would allow 100 DVDs to be transferred in high quality simultaneously.
Other exhibits had the students isolating their own DNA and preserving it in a necklace (from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory) and burning, literally, CDs in a microwave oven (from the Underwriters Laboratory).
Raven Hanna
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