Flat Johnny. Image courtesy of Sarah Demers
At the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS control room in Geneva, Swizerland, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory postdoctoral researcher Sarah Demers meets travelers from all over the world. Her most recent visitor is made of paper and arrived by mail.
Hand-drawn by 8-year-old Johnny, a relative of Demer's, "Flat Johnny" took a tour of ATLAS and the town of Dresden with her. She chronicled their travels in a series of pictures.
The real Johnny mailed his paper namesake as part of a classroom activity inspired by the book Flat Stanley. In the story, a young boy named Stanley is flattened by a falling bulletin board, and realizes that he can now travel the world by mail. Flat Stanley has his picture taken in various exotic and beautiful locations, and with the people he meets there. The Flat Stanley Project has grown to include thousands of participants, and teaches children letter writing as they send their own "flat" selves to other students, people in locations they'd like to visit, or famous figures. Clint Eastwood appeared with his daughter's "Flat Stanley" at the Academy Awards, and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger brought his son's "flat self" on The Tonight Show. Recipients take photos with the flat people and send them back to the students.
Along with photos, Demers sent postcards from France and Switzerland back to Johnny and his class. "I don't know how much the kids know about CERN. I didn't delve into the physics too much," she said. "I told [Johnny] one of the things I like most about my job is that I get to work with people from all over the world." Demers will continue to work at ATLAS for a few years. She is looking at tau leptons, and works on the trigger for the ATLAS detector with the SLAC group at CERN.
Flat Maya admires the LHC tunnel with traveling companion Travis Brooks. Photo courtesy of Travis Brooks
A Flat Stanley visited the SLAC Klystron Gallery a few years ago with Web consultant Kevin Munday and his wife, Kelly Daley. Their flat traveling companions, often drawn by one of their 26 nieces and nephews, have also visited ITER in France. "With the SLAC visit, I remember that we wanted to get the photo in the world's longest building," said Munday, who does contract work for SLAC. "It's a great way to get kids excited about physics."
Johnny isn't the only Flat Child who's visited CERN. Travis Brooks, who runs the SPIRES databases at SLAC, took Flat Maya to the lab last year; she's the 2D version of his niece, who lives in Atlanta and was 8 at the time. Here they are posing in the Large Hadron Collider's 15-mile-long circular tunnel. You can follow their adventures in these photos posted on flickr.
Brooks and his wife seem to be an epicenter of Flat Tourism. They had a visit from Flat Maya the previous year, too, and took her climbing in Yosemite, tied by a shoestring to a climbing harness. And before that came Flat Wyatt, sent by his cousin's son. Unfortunately he arrived at a dull time, Brooks says: "Flat Wyatt mostly lounged around the house."
An earlier version of this story first appeared in SLAC Today.
