Lost and Wanted(113)
He heard us at the door and looked up.
“Jack!” he said. “Hey!” They hadn’t seen each other since the spring, when Jack had spent an afternoon in my office on a day off from school.
“And this is Simmi,” I told him.
Neel got up and high-fived each kid. Then he indicated his screen. “Want to see something funny?”
The children stepped closer to see the screen. It was a cartoon of Santa Claus in space, throwing down the sort of warped net we sometimes use to represent gravitational waves. Oops, I almost forgot LIGO, Santa was saying.
Simmi made a questioning face at Jack, who clearly didn’t understand either.
“You might have to explain,” I told Neel. “To me, too—because if the rumors are right, Santa’s definitely not going to forget LIGO next year.”
Neel grinned at me. “Roxy says the prize will only count if I get an invitation to Stockholm myself—and even if LIGO wins, I’m not important enough to go. So you and I are going to have to hit it big with the rotor project.” Then he turned to the kids. “The machines ‘heard’ gravitational waves for the second time around Christmas,” he said, “so the joke is that the new waves were a present from Santa. The reindeer are being knocked around by the waves. That’s silly, since you wouldn’t be able to feel gravitational waves unless you were right up close to the source.”
Jack smiled uncertainly.
“But I also think it’s funny because there are a lot of people who thought gravitational waves were about as real as Santa Claus. It’s been a while since you guys were into Santa, right?”
“Jack hasn’t believed since he was three,” I said. “I had to remind him not to spoil it for the other kids.”
“Oh yeah, me, too.” Simmi suddenly sounded young, in her eagerness to appear the opposite.
“You have to wonder about those kids who believe in him,” Neel said, pleasing both children. “But I like the cartoon. What we do here does sometimes feel like magic, at least inside the lab.” He looked from one to the other. “So do you guys want to go in?”
15.
We left the offices in NW-22 through a side door, descending a few iron steps where there had once been a loading dock. We crossed the parking lot and went up another set to the adjacent building that contained the lab.
“Are there real lasers in here?” Simmi asked.
Neel nodded. “Very cool infrared lasers, actually.”
“Can we see them?” Jack asked.
I started to explain why that wouldn’t be a good idea, but Neel looked down at Jack and smiled: “Let’s pull out all the stops,” he said. “Why not?”
“Awesome,” Jack said.
“You’re just going to have to pay attention,” Neel said. “Really follow instructions, because the lasers could be dangerous.”
Both kids nodded solemnly. “What could they do?” Simmi asked.
“They could burn your skin, or your eyes,” Neel said. “Not where we’ll be standing, though. We’ll be looking at them through a little round window, like the porthole of a ship. But we’ll wear glasses, just to be absolutely safe.”
We followed Neel down to the basement level, where he used his ID to open another locked door into a hallway. Posters describing different elements of LIGO’s operation hung under fluorescent lights, giving the stuffy, underground passageway the feeling of a high school corridor. Neel guided us past the restrooms, which the children assured me they didn’t need, and around a corner to the small control room that led to the lab. The control room was narrow inside, only about six by ten feet, with a row of computers on three walls. To the right of where we’d come in was a second door—heavy, steel, and plastered with cautionary signage—which led directly into the lab. I saw Jack noticing the black-and-yellow “Danger” sign, as Neel passed us the safety glasses, along with paper shoe protectors and elasticized white surgical caps.
“Are these to keep us safe from the lasers, too?” Simmi asked, tucking her hair into the cap. She wasn’t wearing earrings, but I saw that her piercings had closed neatly, without any visible irritation.
“Those are actually to protect the machines, not you,” Neel said. “Same with the booties over our shoes. You’ll see that almost everything inside the lab is covered with foil or plastic; even just a few specks of dust inside the interferometer, and the experiment stops working the way it should.”
He indicated the red light above the entrance. “When that light is red, it means the lasers in the lab are on.”
Jack and Simmi were suitably impressed, and even more so when we actually entered the lab. There was the steady hum of the equipment; our feet in their paper shoes made no sound on the concrete floor. I saw the children taking in the colored wiring, the pneumatic tubing, the surrounding installations of shiny auxiliary equipment; this was what science was supposed to look like. We turned a corner, and there was the massive steel beam pipe right at eye level, almost four feet wide. The two silo-shaped vacuum chambers at either end of the pipe rose higher, almost to the skylit, triple-height ceiling.
“Whoa,” Jack said, looking up.
I had been wondering if Neel was going to be able to boil his description of gravitational wave detection down to the kids’ level, but he was remarkably patient. He explained that the beam pipe represented just a small segment of the enormous machines in the photos they’d seen outside. Neel pointed to the vacuum chambers at either end of the pipe.