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Row, row, row...
But a few days later, fully recovered from the competition, she thinks she might do it again. “Some people just never learn,” says Dunford, a University of Chicago Enrico Fermi Fellow working on the Large Hadron Collider. Dunford has certainly had ample opportunity to learn. She has rowed crew for the University of California at Irvine, played soccer (“horribly,” she claims) while living in Philadelphia, and run four marathons. When she’s not at the lab, she’s training. While preparing for the Tour, “I hardly got any sleep,” she says. Dunford rows in a crew of five, among whom she is the only physicist. The others work in business and executive job search. The diversity of the group makes for interesting conversation during practice, she says: “They’re very interested in the detector—‘Why does it have to be so big and complicated," and "When is the beam going to turn on?’” There was little chatter during the big race, though—just five people determined to reach the finish line. Every two hours, each rower would get a break to rest, eat and drink, and use the “bathroom”—a cup. There were 16 boats in the race, 11 with all-male or mostly male crews and five more evenly mixed teams like Dunford’s. Her boat placed tenth overall, but first among the mixed teams. For Dunford, it seems, there will always be another finish line looming. Right after the Tour, she was back in training. She had a marathon coming up.
Parties without borders And along the way, they make time to play. By tradition, one of the highlights of the summer program is a series of parties thrown by various national groups. This year, close on the heels of the French, Dutch, American, Italian, and German-Austrian parties, an Israeli-Palestinian party was held in Building 216. Israeli and Palestinian flags flew side by side, and a banner on the wall proclaimed “Because things can be different.” The word “Peace” was also displayed in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The party had been organized by four Israelis and one Palestinian, Muhammad Yousef Alhroob; he was the first Palestinian to ever take part in the program. “In Palestine, where I grew up, I always saw Israelis as armed soldiers,” says Alhroob. “At CERN, I have got to know a group of young Israelis who are studying in the same field as me and share my interest in physics.” Another party organizer, Or Cohen, says, “We wanted to show people that despite the hostilities between our two governments, people can get along. This kind of event can help foster tolerance between peoples. Working intensively alongside a Palestinian forced me to look differently at the political situation.” The event was also an opportunity for the five organizers to show off their respective cultures. “Through our music and food, which are very similar in Palestine and in Israel, we wanted to teach the other students something about our two peoples,” Alhroob says. With more than 200 people in attendance, including CERN physicists and staff, the organizers pronounced the party a great success.  Photo: Haley Bridger
Scary Ben Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed, striking a kite and shooting down the string to a bald scarecrow. Its giant eyes glowed. “What’s that?” asked a Girl Scout working on a nearby display. “It’s a famous scientist,” her friend replied. The girl could have been talking about the scarecrow version of Ben Franklin, the father of electricity, or the man standing behind him, Fermilab scientist Todd Johnson. He worked with docents from the lab to construct the mechanical scarecrow, whose plasma-disc eyes were designed to spark whenever a strobe light and thunderclap recreated Franklin’s famous kite-flying experiment. In a sea of creatures crafted from straw and cloth, from sports ghouls and movie characters to a singing Sasquatch, Ben stood out. “I love getting to do the special effects and work behind the scenes,” Johnson says. “I never stopped being a kid.” It was the fourth year Fermilab submitted a scientist-themed entry to the annual Scarecrow Festival, which draws 60,000 visitors. The high-energy physics laboratory also runs a booth at the festival with science activities for kids. Johnson, who says he loves playing with “science toys,” was in his element the day before the festival, tinkering with the motor and electronics that powered Ben Franklin. Johnson’s recorded voice, adjusted to sound deep and menacing, boomed out of the scarecrow whenever someone touched a button and triggered a lightning flash. As the thunder boomed once more, the scarecrow turned to look at the Girl Scouts and proclaimed, “That was really quite illuminating.” Déjà blue As Denzel Washington crawled into the time machine to travel to the past, Cully leaped up and hit pause. “It’s CDF! It’s CDF!” he shouted. Cully works as a physicist on the CDF experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. CDF, a three-story detector painted in classic Fermilab blue, is one of the two large experiments on the Tevatron. Sure enough, when he enlarged the TV image of the time machine, there was the CDF logo on one of the wedges. “To really make that accurate a reproduction,” Cully says, “you would have had to see the detector or the specs.” The film crew probably did.
Production designer Chris Seager says he first considered medical technology, such as an MRI scanner, as the model for a time machine. But the hardware seemed too small. He visited power plants, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Cambridge High Energy Physics Laboratory looking for inspiration. But it was the roundness of particle accelerators, and their raw display of wires and sensors, that finally caught his attention and provided the feeling of evolving science he was seeking. “We wanted to keep things very much grounded and make it feel like the machine had come from a real laboratory,” Seager says. “We found some fabulous references on the Internet to enormous pieces of equipment,” and incorporated the look of those detectors into the movie prop. While Cully burst with excitement at seeing the CDF in the movie, his family was more subdued. After he finished jumping up and down, Cully noticed that his parents and sister looked confused. “They asked me,
‘What’s CDF?’” Cully says, with obvious disappointment. “I guess my family didn’t remember the tour I gave them, or that I’m writing my thesis on it.” You have 3Hψi new messages Somewhere along the thread, one of the physicists mistyped an e-mail address, rerouting the deluge from Ben H. Lillie, a particle theorist at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, to Ben V. Lillie, a 29-year-old pharmaceutical sales representative and father of two in Auburn, Alabama. “The first e-mail showed up in early June, and I honestly thought it was spam,” Alabama Ben recalls. “It looked like one of those pharmaceutical online purchase deals or viruses that had nothing but characters and numbers.”  Document courtesy of JoAnne Hewett
Oblivious to the error, SLAC’s Hewett and her colleagues continued their discussions of ILC simulations and novel SUSY parameters. “We were wondering why we weren’t getting any e-mails back from our Ben,” Hewett says, “but we went our merry way.” As the paper neared its final stages, the content of the e-mails increased in complexity. “They hardly seemed like English,” says Alabama Ben. “I have a BS in business management and a minor in computer science, so I would like to think I am not a complete idiot, but these e-mails were on such a high level I thought they had to be a joke. Even my computer programs have fewer symbols and characters.” Although the e-mails were incoherent, they seemed harmless, so Alabama Ben ignored them for three weeks. “But then I realized that someone else—my clone in Chicago—was probably feeling left out,” he says. “So I told them they were sending their messages to the wrong address.” His attempt to clarify the situation, however, only made it worse. “We thought that message came from our Ben,” Hewett says, “so it led to a huge flurry of e-mail messages—more than 100 per day for about a week.” Finally, Alabama Ben explained it as clearly as possible for the theoretical physicists. “I’d love to help you guys out,” he insisted, “but I’m just a pharmaceutical rep in Auburn, Alabama, and I’m afraid this is way over my head. But thank you for the interesting e-mails.” “Just a pharmaceutical rep,” he may be, but one with a unique link to the field of theoretical physics. Hewett and her colleagues acknowledge his contribution in the paper they submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, “General Features of Supersymmetric Signals at the ILC: Solving the LHC Inverse Problem,” with a line citing him by name “for his good humor and patience.” As for Alabama Ben, “I see it as the time I dabbled in particle physics and linear theory,” he jokes. “The particle accelerator in the garage still has a few bugs in it, but it’s getting there.”
 Photo courtesy of Tom Nash
GEQ***T “I’d never had a vanity plate before,” Nash says, “but I thought it might be fun. And it fit perfectly!” To his surprise, the California Department of Motor Vehicles denied his request, pronouncing it “offensive to good taste and decency” and “misleading to some of our citizens.” “I was astonished,” Nash recalls. “I didn’t understand how this could be interpreted offensively by even the most distorted of minds.” He immediately called the agency, which told him to submit a written appeal. So Nash, a retired Fermilab physicist and member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory scientific collaboration, wrote to explain that the message represented Albert Einstein’s gravitational field equation, G=8πT. The equation describes how the distribution of mass (stress energy tensor, or T) affects the curvature of space-time (G), encapsulating Einstein’s general theory of relativity. “This is one of the most important equations in all of science,” Nash wrote, “and is used to predict the future course of the universe.” When two months passed without a response from the DMV, Nash called Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office. “Then things started to happen,” he says, “and several very efficient people got on the case.” According to an e-mail from Steve Haskins, a communications officer for the agency, “GEQ8PIT was originally refused because it appeared to read 8 with PI (pie). The Special Processing Unit refuses any configuration with 8 (ate) in it, if they are not sure of the meaning, as it appears to be of a sexual connotation.” Haskin says Nash’s original application apparently did explain that the numbers and letters represented Einstein’s field equation, “but it’s safe to say that our technicians, not being gravitational physicists, simply didn’t understand what he meant. When it was later explained in more detail, the configuration was approved.” On Oct. 18, five months and nine days after his initial application, the plates finally arrived. In spite of the delays, Nash is happy with the outcome. “Apparently there had been a change of personnel in the Special Processing Unit and my first letter was lost,” he says. “So the DMV has no hard feelings about Einstein, and I have no hard feelings about the DMV.”
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