Particle Accelerator

Hello Friends,

Tsukuba in Japan is a science city. According to a quick online search, ... "Tsukuba has become one of the world's key sites for government-industry collaborations in basic research. Earthquake safety, environmental degradation, studies of roadways, fermentation science, microbiology, and plant genetics are some of the broad research topics having close public-private partnerships."

One of our excursion days at the recent ISU Congress was a science day. All in one day we dropped in at the JAXA Tsukuba Space Center, the Laboratory for Environmental Disaster Prevention Research, the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (known as KEK), and the Tsukuba Botanical Garden. Quite a day. Sometime soon I'll show you some images from the Space Center and Botanical Garden. The Laboratory for Environmental Disaster Prevention Research had fewer good photo ops, but in this day and age of global warming and climate change, it was good to see their proactive approach toward understanding and dealing with natural and man-made disasters.

Most impressive just for the hardware we got to see and photograph was the particle accelerator at KEK. I'm amazed they let us in to see this stuff, and was expecting at any moment a James Bond like chase scene with the entire place blowing up. In fact they were in a temporary down time on the Belle II Experiment, which they describe as a "Quest for New Physics." Ultimately they're trying to get a better understanding of sub-atomic particles by firing them at each other at unbelievably high energies (billions of volts) and watching the scatter patterns. I won't pretend to understand the difference between the various sub-atomic particles they're studying, but these boy-toys were very cool to see.

I took these shots cha-cha style (shoot the left eye image, slide over, shoot the right eye image) with my Google Pixel 6 Pro cellphone. The two shots were taken approximately two feet apart. I brought them in to StereoPhoto Maker and auto-aligned them, then saved them in anaglyph and stereo pair formats.

Regards,

Barry Rothstein

I send out a weekly email of these. If you'd like to be included, please go to the contact page and send me an email.

Previous Images of the Week