The geekiest engagement ever

The geekiest engagement ever

Photo courtesy of Dave Mosher

Dave Mosher wanted his wedding proposal to go off with a bang. A big bang.

So how would a self-described science geek do that?

By tricking his beloved into climbing into the guts of a house-sized machine that creates and studies a hot soup of energy like the one present just moments after the universe exploded into existence. What else?

“Make as many symbolic interpretations as you'd like—I chose the location for a lot of reasons!—but the truth is I wanted us to have a great story to tell,” Mosher wrote on his blog. “A ridiculously nerdy, epic and smile-prompting story.”

Mosher and his bride-to-be Kendra Snyder love a good science story. The pair met at a reunion for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory writing interns. Both now have successful communication careers—Mosher as a productive freelance science journalist and Snyder as a writer until recently at Brookhaven National Laboratory, who now works at the American Museum of Natural History.

It was Snyder's Brookhaven job that made her easy to dupe.

Mosher arranged for Snyder's boss to pull her aside with news of an unusual discovery at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC. A rare crystalline deposit had been found in RHIC's beamline at the STAR detector and Snyder had to take a look immediately, her boss said. Forget going home on time at the end of a long week; she had to get to the detector pronto.

An intrigued Snyder hopped into her car and drove to the detector with no clue that the trip would end in one of her happiest days ever. Behind an enormous concrete radiation shield and inside the colossal detector, which had recently been opened up for its usual summer maintenance, lay the crystalline deposit. Mosher hid nearby. As Snyder ascended a stairway up to the center of the detector, the shape of a glittering diamond engagement ring became clear. Before she had a moment to think, Mosher snuck up behind Snyder, grabbed the ring and knelt down on one knee. For a few moments, she giggled in disbelief before following up with a heartfelt yes.

Mosher then further sealed the deal with a hand-made cake bearing the promise “KendraDave. Nerds 4 Life.”