Dispatch from Chicago: ALCon, day two

A trip through the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a play about creation’s birthday, and a sailing trip on Lake Michigan were the highlights of the second day of the national conference of the Astronomical League July 5.

Wilson Hall, the administrative building
 at Fermilab, has a spectacular 16-story atrium.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Given the recent news about the Higgs boson, things were relatively quiet at Fermilab, where something of an “I knew that” air seemed about the place. There wasn’t much talk of the Higgs at all, though Fermilab has a FAQ document about the boson among its many handouts for visitors. The document describes the Higgs field as like “a giant vat of molasses spread throughout the universe” and the boson as “a particle that helps transmit the mass-giving Higgs force field, similar to the way a particle of light, the photon, transmits the electromagnetic field.” The universe seems really sticky.

Dr. Jason Steffen, who gave league members a talk about his work on the Kepler project, did give a shoutout to the particle, noting that without it he wouldn’t have a job, as there would be no extrasolar planets to detect and study. Not to worry; Steffen and his colleagues will be busy, as he said the current thinking is that up to 30 percent of stars have planetary systems. “Planets are all over the place,” he said.

The tour of Fermilab was interesting; many of the workers there are in something of a fishbowl, as their offices are glass-walled and visiting gawkers can peer right in. Among the offices at which we gawked was Fermilab’s remote operation center for the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is bigger and packs more electrical oomph than does Fermilab’s Tevatron, which has been shut down now as physicists dream up new experiments for the infrastructure.

ALCon continued to mix art and science. While at Fermilab we watched the play Creation’s Birthday written and directed by Dr. Hasan Padamsee, who spoke on day one of the conference. The play is at its heart about the work of Edwin Hubble and Father George Lemaitre to convince Einstein that the universe is expanding. There was plenty of math and physics in there—Padamsee is a physicist at Cornell—but he’s weaved in themes of religion, philosophy, art, sports, international politics, office politics, war, and a love story to make for a fascinating narrative. We especially enjoyed Julia Weed’s performance in the role of Einstein.

After the show we headed for the sailing ship “Windy” for an evening cruise on Lake Michigan in view of the Chicago night-time skyline. The cruise featured a presentation on navigating by the stars, some constellation lore, and singing of sea shanties. The best part of the show, though, was unplanned. A cool thunderstorm was lurking near us on the lake, flashing occasional lightning from cloud to cloud. Amid all of this the Moon rose, shining through the clouds and fog as a bright red-orange. This led one astronomy wag (me) to declare that, dang, it’s true–Mars really DOES look as big as the Moon!

It was a long but entertaining day of astronomy fun. Friday: a trip to the historic Yerkes Observatory.