I was looking at Google maps at a location near Chicago, so I scooted over to take a look at Fermilab (map). As always, I was struck first by the sheer beauty of the arrangement, and next by how wonderful it is that we human beings would undertake such a massive project just to better understand the laws of nature. And finally, of course, by the irony that it takes something this big to examine particles on very small scales. Blame the wave nature of matter for that: to look at short distances, you need high energies, and that means a whomping big accelerator.
This moved me to take a look at other giant scientific facilities. Unfortunately CERN puts its accelerators underground, so the Large Hadron Collider doesn’t mark the landscape with enormous circles. Here’s SLAC (map), the largest linear accelerator in the world and claimed to be the world’s straightest object.
Astronomy — investigating the very big, rather than the very small — is the other specialty that makes good use of giant facilities. Here’s the collection of telescopes at the Mauna Kea Observatory (map).
Radio astronomers go even bigger. Here’s the Very Large Array (map). (Check out Arecibo if you prefer single-dish telescopes.)
Radio waves used to be an exotic way to look at the sky, but now we have gravitational waves. Here’s the LIGO facility in Hanford, Washington (map).
But it isn’t just particle physicists and astronomers who build landscape-altering facilities. Here’s the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab (map). It creates X-rays for use in materials science, biology, chemistry, and who knows what else.
These images are not all to the same scale; in particular, I had to zoom out for LIGO and the VLA, and zoomed in on Mauna Kea. But everything here is pretty big. It takes a substantial effort to figure out the universe.
Any other good suggestions?
I took a tour of the accelerator at SLAC. The San Andreas fault actually crosses the facility. They claim SLAC is the “nail” that will hold California together when The Big One strikes.
When it was built, they dug down to bedrock that had been geologically stable for 300 million years. For the concrete base, they poured concrete continuously 24 hours a day for two weeks and the pad the accelerator sits on is straight to within the thickness of a dime over two miles. It is powered by it’s own power plant … a generating facility large enough to power a city of 25,000.
What an amazing structure!
Area 51
Hey #15 – is that the Shuttle launch pad?
Re Fermilab: the accelerator tunnels are a bit underground with dirt berms covering them, but what is most observable from air are the service roads (and H2O cooling channels around the rings) that basically trace the rings and beamlines.
Note that your lovely aerial view is only about half the site, and zooming out will show the drama of suburban sprawl encircling the Lab’s 6800 acres of open space.
Chuck from #26: Um — i’m glad you took a tour of SLAC. I used to give those too, and we had a lot of great visitors. And you’re right that when building SLAC, people dug down to the bedrock because of earthquake issues.
But uh — i kind of *doubt* any tourguide there would tell you SLAC would “hold CA together” — HEP does a lot for humanity, but i don’t think we could claim to govt officials that we will hold the Golden State together when the Big One strikes!
I also doubt the tourguide said that the S.A. fault goes *under* the beamline — it goes *close*, it’s within about a mile of the western edge of the beamline, as you can see if you zoom in e.g. on this map: http://geology.com/san-andreas-fault/
but definitely does *not* go under it Just wanted to clear these things up a bit…
Quite an interesting column, Sean, and some good visuals from other readers, too!
-M
Interesting story Sean. I’ve had a look at the Mauna Kea facilities before using Google Earth… the snow with the telescopes I think is particularly photogenic.
Not really scientific, per se, but impressive from above: the big military ammo depot near Hawthorne, NV. Sometimes you fly over it going to/from SFO or SMF…
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