Celebrating 50 Years of Science: Fermilab
Last Thursday I traveled to Batavia, Illinois for a tour of Fermi Laboratory and its archives, hosted by the Chicago Area Archivists and Fermilab archivist, Valerie Higgins. If you are unfamiliar with Fermilab here is a brief summary from their website : “As the United States' premier particle physics laboratory, we do science that matters. We work on the world's most advanced particle accelerators and dig down to the smallest building blocks of matter. We also probe the farthest reaches of the universe, seeking out the nature of dark matter and dark energy....Fermilab's 6,800-acre site is…managed by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.” I only had a general understanding of what Fermilab does before this trip, so I was excited to learn more. We traveled by bus through the campus to get to the archives. On the way, I learned the first director of Fermilab, Robert Wilson, was a skilled sculpture and architecture des