Physics of Argentine tango

Members of the Argentine Tango class dance during a lesson on the stage of Ramsey Auditorium in Wilson Hall.

Every Wednesday night when the lights dim in Ramsey Auditorium the stage becomes a milonga, an Argentine dance salon.

"Physics and tango both require passion to become very good," said Pamela Noyes, of Fermilab's Procurement Department. "Physicists follow motion with their equations. Tango dancers follow each others motion with their senses.... If done well, both are extremely gratifying, perhaps one more to the mind and the other to the senses."

Noyes, who has taken tango classes for the last three years, grew tired of traveling weekdays to Chicago for classes. So, she asked her instructors to come to Fermilab to teach.

Two professional Argentine tango dancers from Chicago teach the beginning and intermediate classes, which began July 23 and have already attracted more than 50 students.

"I would talk about tango at work and people would say they would like to learn," Noyes said.

While ballroom and folk-dancing classes have been taught before at Kuhn Barn, this is the first Argentine tango class. Compared to other forms of tango, Argentine tango is a more intimate dance where the leader and follower interpret the music spontaneously and dance in an open or closed embrace.

"Tango is all about walking," Noyes said. "If you can walk with attitude, you can learn to dance tango."

The classes draw dance recruits from all over the laboratory, including graduate students, interns and the laboratory's director. Most students have no prior dance experience.

"I've always loved to tango," said Fermilab's Director Pier Oddone. "We don't get much of a chance to go dancing around here, so when I saw that Argentine tango classes were offered we jumped at the opportunity."

The on-going classes cost $15 per session. Space is limited. Contact Pamela Noyes for more information.

-- Jennifer L. Johnson

Final LHC synchronization test a success

From CERN, Aug. 25, 2008

CERN has today announced success of the second and final test of the Large Hadron Collider's beam synchronization systems which will allow the LHC operations team to inject the first beam into the LHC.

Friday evening Aug. 22, a single bunch of a few particles travelled down the transfer line from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator to the LHC. After a period of optimization, one bunch was kicked up from the transfer line into the LHC beam pipe and steered counter-clockwise about 3 kilometres around the LHC.

"Thanks to a fantastic team, both the clock-wise and counter-clockwise tests went without a hitch. We look forward to a resounding success when we make our first attempt to send a beam all the way around the LHC," said Lyn Evans, LHC Project Leader.

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Fruit juice, dirty bombs and the appliance of science

From the Times Online,
Aug. 24, 2008

...[Sir Keith O'Nions, former chief scientist at the Ministry of Defence] is particularly excited about potential gains from the world's biggest scientific experiment - the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator at the European Cern lab near Geneva that will fire up next month.

The £2.6 billion atom-smasher's main goal is to prove - or to disprove - the existence of the Higgs boson, the elusive "God particle" that is supposed to give matter its mass, but which has yet to be detected. But it could also provide clues to processing mountains of surveillance data that are fiendishly difficult to interpret.

"This is no more than an intelligent guess, but the thing about the Large Hadron Collider is that it pushes several things to new limits in technology," Sir Keith said. "One is the detectors themselves; the sensitivity has moved to a new level. The other is the capacity to handle huge amounts of data.

"Effectively, they're looking for the odd event that says, 'Ah yes, we've got one of those,' against a background of events that may be a billion or ten billion. It's looking for the event that actually tells us that the Higgs boson exists, against a lot of information that's not actually very useful.

"Now that's great. They may find the Higgs boson and understand gravity, or they may not. Then you think well, what else can you think of in the world of security where finding the real event among billions of background events may be important? Well, it's all a bit of a no-brainer.

"If you think of the amount of remote observation that's made, of looking for rare events within that, you can start to see that it would not be surprising if some of these mathematical and computational techniques found their way into security, where you've got very large amounts of data and you're looking for that rare event."

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