BaBar is a video star
Search for “BaBar” on YouTube.com, and you'll get a long list of links to a 1980s TV series based on an animated elephant. But a surprise is hidden among the cartoons—a six-minute film shot in the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's BaBar control room.
The film was created by University of Tennessee graduate student Bradley Wogsland, who spent a year at the lab working with BaBar—a detector that records what happens when electrons and positrons collide.
Wogsland started taping comedy sketches as a kid and has posted nearly 400 videos on YouTube. Being a SLACer alternates shots of his family, the lab, and cultural references, including scenes from Lord of the Rings. He's posted films of the SLAC library, deer lounging in the parking lot, and a colleague talking about a string of bicycle mishaps, titled Physicists Shouldn't Ride Bikes.
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Earlier this year he spent a shift operating BaBar and turned the camera on himself.
“I thought a lot of people would be interested to see how the control room works,” says Wogsland. “As a kid, I had no idea what went on inside a control room to take the data, and I wanted to know.”
The video pans around the room, showing various control screens and the data they contain: luminosity, instrumental flux return, the alarm handler. A voice comes over the intercom and says, “Attention: Automatic end run sequences activated.”
The video has garnered more than a thousand hits and a mixed bag of comments.
“Nice, we need more videos like this,” says one viewer.
“What the heck is a BaBar? In words I can understand,” says another. “R u making electricity?”
A third chimes in, “It really is like Star Trek in there.”
After launching a farewell video—a seven-second shot of his SLAC hard hat, with the theme song from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly playing in the background—Wogsland returned to Tennessee. But he has not hung up his camera.
“I'm creating lab demos for a physics class that I'm teaching this fall,” he says, “and posting them on YouTube so students can see equipment in use before they have to use it in the lab. The potential of this emerging medium is enormous.”The control room video can be viewed at http://youtube.com/watch?v=dj7gCZTEoq0.
Ken Kingery
Editor's note: We are collecting online videos related to particle physics to share with our readers. Please let us know your favorites at letters@symmetrymagazine.org.
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