Bonnie Fleming is bowling for neutrinos.
What do you get when you bring together a neutrino physicist and the son of a bowling champion who made his name as a host for an MTV dating show?
You get a very entertaining and accessible video with an explanation of research into neutrinos, one of the most elusive building blocks of matter.
WIRED Science host Chris Hardwick joined Fermilab physicist and Yale University professor Bonnie Fleming at a Chicago bowling alley to discuss her career and his hobby. They look at the similarities between neutrinos and bowling and learn that smashing atoms apart for a living doesn't necessarily translate into being good at sending pins flying.
The brief video is part of the Careers in Science feature of WIRED Science, a weekly TV series arising from a partnership with Wired Magazine and PBS. Wired explains the show's goal on its Web site as:
Each week, WIRED Science correspondents take viewers to the frontiers of discovery across the country and around the world, spotlighting the cutting-edge innovations and research that are defining 21st-century culture, and introducing the high-tech mavericks who are making it happen.
That description fits Fleming, who has worked on several of the leading neutrino projects of the decade, including MiniBooNE, the experiment that searched for a fourth neutrino; ArgoNeuT, the first U.S.-based liquid-argon neutrino detector test, which just recorded its first neutrino; and a proposal to create the world's longest-baseline neutrino experiment by using a neutrino beam from Fermilab, Illinois, to a site in South Dakota.
