That’s an impressive task: Keeping a 27km ring under vacuum and chilled to 1.9 degrees Kelvin. Looks like it is working though. Now they just need to guide7TeV protons around it.

On the way out Sunday, we stopped by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring in the camera, but this place was cool. And free! We got to see a working demonstration of the Babbage Difference Engine #2 which was built a few years ago by a guy from the London Science Museum. I saw an older version of the Babbage difference engine in London when I was there, but it was in a glass case and I didn’t really understand how it worked. In mountain view they give demonstrations regularly where they go through how it works and actually crank out the first 30 values of a polynomial. In the demo we saw, the machine got jammed and the terms after that ended wrong. I think I’ll stick to my silicon-based computing. But it was cool to see none-the-less. They also had all kinds of old computer hardware, including a 2ft diameter hard disk platter (it stored 10MB, I believe it was)! They have a video about the museum on youtube.

A few more pictures after the jump…

I stopped by a Barnes and Nobles on a recent trip to Orlando, looking for something to read on the plane ride back home. I ended up walking out with “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments”, by George Johnson (Amazon). Although I could have saved $10 getting it on Amazon (why does anybody buy books at a place like B&N if they aren’t in a hurry?), I don’t regret it. It proved to be a short and enjoyable trip (the former perhaps being a requirement for the latter) through MORE than ten groundbreaking science experiments over the last four centuries, describing how many of the basic facts we now take for granted about our world were tweaked out by clever and persistent experimentation. He tells a great story, without overwhelming it with too much tedium to put you to sleep, but enough that I felt like I knew what was going on.

Although physics dominated, Johnson’s list covered everything from Galileo rolling balls down tracks and his clever mechanisms for timing them in order to discovere basic laws of acceleration, to William Harvey opening up the mysteries of the heart, to Millikan measuring the charge of an electron (and showing that charge was in fact carried by discrete particulars in discrete amounts), and even Pavlov and his salivating dogs made the list. It was an enjoyable, enlightening, and inspiring read. It makes me wish for the chance to discover some hitherto unknown fact about the universe that no human had ever before seen. It also made me appreciate some of the things that seem obvious now but weren’t always so obvious.