Across the Universe
Every week, producers at To The Best Of Our Knowledge assemble a newsletter of our best content from our most recent shows, as well as original stories and behind the scenes insights that give a peek behind the curtain of putting the show together.
This week, producer Charles Monroe-Kane told us about his own small adventure to see a little bit more clearly into a usually inscrutable night sky.
I had just driven seven hours to drop our kids off at the grandparents and had an hour to kill before picking my wife up at the bus station. It was 8pm. I was tired. I knew she would be tired too after a girl’s weekend in Chicago. But then, I remembered the Perseid meteor shower. “Best seen after midnight on the 10th, 11th, and 12th of August.” It was the 12th.
So, I rallied. I texted my wife and she was game. I threw together a picnic of cookies, Chex mix, tamales, and Prosecco. I grabbed the bug spray and a blanket. We drove to the far end of a state park near the entrance of a beach. There we found an empty parking lot and newly mowed open field. It was perfect for sky gazing.
We left our phones behind, having read that it takes the eyes 20 minutes to adjust properly to the night. We laid out our blanket, clunked paper cups, ate our food, and got down to business — meteor business.
As our eyes adjusted so did our other senses. The katydids and cicadas and tree frogs became clearer and louder. The buzzing of mosquitoes, more ominous. The touch of my wife’s hand felt electric. We were mostly silent, except for the did-you-see-that’s that exploded from us when a fireball left a particularly awesome wake of light and color behind.
As I laid there quietly in the dark, my wife’s head on my shoulder, I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was not looking up at the cosmos but looking down upon it. Gravity was the only thing keeping me from falling into the arms of Perseus. I held my wife tighter and together we spun and tilted and rotated across the Universe.
— Charles
Science is a team sport, as this listener wisely points out. It takes a huge team to make a discovery like this.
Halzen alludes to that in the interview, speaking to the unique engineering challenges that the Ice Cube neutrino detector presented:
It’s a kilometer cube, a mile deep, under the South Pole. [To drill that deep] you melt your way into it. And that was of course the challenging part — to actually build this detector a mile deep. That was finally done by a hot water drill. The hot water drill was actually a concept that was developed at the University of Wisconsin. You cannot buy this from the oil companies in Texas.
The dozens of engineers, scientists and support staff that enabled the Ice Cube neutrino detector certainly should share pride in the discovery that Halzen describes in the interview. This video (courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Ice Cube Neutrino Laboratory) also gives a sense of how collaborative the tracking of where a neutrino comes from can be.
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