Barns Family USA Odyssey: Nerd-fest 2012

The entire second half of our trip has been planned around this date today. Twice a year the Trinity Test Site and the Very Large Array telescope facility are opened to the public for touring. We simply had to be there.

I will let Ken write the blog today as this was his day!

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A full on geek day today. First up was Trinity Site, where the first-ever nuclear weapon was exploded 3 weeks before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Site is on the currently active White Sands Missile Range, so only open for civilians for 7 hrs, twice a year. Given that it is nothing but a monument in a patch of scrubby desert surrounded by a chain fence (and more scrubby desert), I was astonished by the huge crowds - we were 2.5 hours out of the nearest city. The parking lot was a veritable bingo-call of out-of-state licence plates.

One of the things that struck me at the Museum of Nuclear Science and History yesterday was the amount of consideration that had gone into first uses of "the bomb". The decision on whether to deploy atomic warfare against the Japanese is one of the moral focal points of the 20th century (and potentially of all of human history). Debate continues to this day about whether the decision that President Truman made was justifiable. The team working on the bomb, and the US Government, fully considered (and reasonably accurately so) all the moral, ethical, and practical considerations of whether to use the bomb; if so, then how; and what the likely implications would be in the decades ahead of their decisions. This was even done some months before the bomb (and experimental data about its effectiveness) was available! Only then did they give the go ahead. All the active participants saw use of atomic warfare on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the "least worst" option. For that, and for their insistence that this be a joint decision of many involved Manhattan Project participants, I have to respect them.

After that, a 2 hour drive to the Very Large Array, which featured in the movie "Contact", and ground zero for radio astronomy in the USA. 27 telescopes sit in a very large array (surprise, surprise) spread in a "Y" with each arm over 20km long. It recently (in the last couple of months) completed a 10-year upgrade than dramatically increased data detection capabilities. The raw detected data comes in at about 2TB/sec (about 400 DVDs per second), is run through a collator to filter the noise out, and the final useful data (about 6 DVDs per second) is sent to the astronomers who requested the data be collected. A typical data collection run will last 30min up to 12 hours.

Julie and I really connected with where we were today (though perhaps felt a little overwhelmed at the VLA). The kids were phenomenally well-behaved given how dry the day must have been for them. Tori surprised me by how animatedly she was discussing different wavelengths of energy. Sharp-eyed Phi enjoyed finding small shards of trinitite, and the "special" way it was made (sand sucked up into a nuclear fireball, fusing into globs of greenish glass). The boys enjoyed the various hand-on activities while awaiting the tour of the VLA (Ben making a planisphere, and Oli colouring-by-numbers a grid of data to produce a pattern). I am so proud of my little geeklings!

Ground Zero monument at Trinity.

Sophia with a piece of Trinitite - very rare, and illegal to remove from the site. Radioactive, but Phi's radiation exposure would have been less than a standard chest x-ray, and about 1/10th the dose of our trans-Pacific flights.

Trinity was hugely popular with the geeks of America! The carpark was full to overflowing, and the Army personnel were on hand to guide cars to their designated parking spot. The wonky photo is explained by the fact that, technically, using our camera outside the official test site boundaries would have got us into trouble with the US Army.