Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

Do you all know about the Gamma Forest? In 1961 the supergeniuses at Brookhaven National Labs decided it would be a good thing to drag a 9500 Curie Cesium-137 source into the middle of a forest just to see what would happen.

What happened, of course, is that it killed everything. It sterilized the microbes in the soil to the extent that 65 years later it is still mostly a kill zone, nothing larger than small surface weeds can grow. It is clearly visible in Google Maps. The site’s surface water drains to the Peconic river. I used to canoe in there, yay!

https://maps.app.goo.gl/fhjeJF4Todp5FWAa7?g_st=ic

https://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/bulletin/files/1962/1962011...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/brookhaven-gamma-forest

BNL, of course, sits right on top of Long Island’s drinking water aquifer, and the aquifer layer that supplies drinking water is not even from below the allegedly impermeable clay layer.

https://www.nswcawater.org/water_facts/our-long-island-aquif...

I grew up on Long Island and I expect that it will eventually kill me. My elementary school, middle school, high school, and childhood home are all located within a Superfund site that was/is/will continue to be contaminated with cadmium and hexavalent chromium. The entire island is littered with WW2 and Cold War defense industry detritus.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

This is in preparation for starting construction work on the Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC) which will use the same tunnel and experiment locations.

I worked at BNL during college days through the SULI program! Some of my peers from college is working there full time now too. I got to work on some really cool stuff but unfortunately a lot of the tenured researcher I knew have seem to left. I heard a lot of researchers left during Trump’s first term.

How time passes! I remember touring the RHIC tunnels back in 1999 when it was being made.

as a layperson, it seems the whole collider stuff has not been a very fruitful scientific direction so far (has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?)

maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data.