The Atom Smashers

[beamjockey]

Somebody has recently made a documentary about Fermilab's desperate race to gather all the data we can before CERN's Large Hadron Collider supersedes the doomed Tevatron. And it has a great, old-fashioned title: The Atom Smashers.

The trailer shows lots of people and machines I work with. You can glimpse Todd Johnson at a console. I've never been in a documentary about Fermilab, though I have received good notices for my performance in the Controlled Access safety-training video, if I do say so myself.

The Atom Smashers will premiere at the Museum of Science and Industry on 19 September, and be broadcast on PBS's Independent Lens the week of 25 November.

Read more at Symmetry.


(Beyond the metal ceiling of the Cockcroft-Walton accelerator in that picture are the offices of my department.)

Comments

[kaffy-r.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'll keep this on my schedule!

[madtechie2718.livejournal.com]

Not just the discovery of *a* lifetime, but of *everyone's* lifetime.

The topic came up on a comedy/quiz show (Mock the Week) last night - the compere posts an answer, in this case a date, and the others have to guess the question.

"If the Nth of Septemer is the answer, what is the question?"

The question, of course, was "when does the LHC start up, create a microscopic black hole and destroy the earth?"

[tandw.livejournal.com]

I understand there's going to be a party early next Wednesday morning at the LHC Remote Ops Center to celebrate first beam.

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

Do you happen to know if the presentation at the Museum of Science & Industry will be an extra-cost thing or included in the basic admission price?

Reason I ask: I'm thinking of coming to WindyCon this November, and thinking of arriving a day early so I can spend much of Friday at the Museum, and if this will be an extra-cost ticket I need to adjust my budget for the trip.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

The premiere is in September, not November. As far as I know, Atom Smashers won't be playing there by November.

The Museum does have an Omnimax theater (a planetarium-like dome-shaped movie screen), and it does indeed cost extra, so you might check out what films will be playing if you're interested in that.

Around 1985 I did some research for a new history-of-spaceflight exhibit at the Museum, so my name is on a little acknowledgment plaque somewhere nearby.

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

o drat
too bad it won't still be playing at WindyCon time.

I'm mostly interested in revisiting the U-505 display, and the big model train layout; this would have been a nice bit of lagniappe, though.