The last time I traveled to Long Island, New York, it was to visit Harry Pearson at his home in Sea Cliff for The Absolute Sound celebration party Harry hosted to celebrate the continuation of his magazine, which had been purchased by new owners, and whose influx of money helped rescue the magazine which had fallen on hard times financially. Harry's party was a whos who of audio industry notables and I had a great time talking with all those attending, and Harry was an absolutely charming host at his big blue Victorian on the Cliffs of Sea.
My most recent trip to Long Island was for a very different reason, though, as I was a member of review team there to review one of Brookhaven National Laboratory's scientific research programs. Brookhaven has an impressive scientific pedigree, and research done at the Lab has resulted in seven Nobel Prizes.
The nice folks at BNL gave our review team a great tour of their research facilities, including the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), the super-duper HUGE NSLS II that is under construction, and the very amazing Relativisitc Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The NSLS is a national scientific user facility funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that scientists come from around the world to do research at. The NSLS has two big electron storage rings that provide powerful X-rays or ultra violet light, respectively. Scientists access the light through beamlines, which are experimental stations that allow for various kinds of experiments to be carried out. You can read more about what a light source can do for scientists and everyday people at http://www.nsls.bnl.gov/about/everyday/ .
As you can see in the photos below, the research floor of the NSLS is absolutely jam-packed with scientific research gear used to access the beamlines.
Who says scientists don't have a sense of humor? Below Big Bird is preparing to take flight on the light!
If you think the back of your Hi-Fi rig is messy because of all the interconnects, just take a look at what the NSLS researchers have to deal with!
The new National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS II) that Brookhaven is in the process of constructing is a reason to celebrate for scientists, as the new research facility will have an electron storage ring of 3 billion electron-volts that will provide research scientists x-rays that are more than 10,000 times brighter than the current Brookhaven NSLS user facility.
The new NSLS II that is under construction was too big to get into one photo. If you want an idea of scale think bigger than a football stadium, but in this case a stadium full of electrons!
I told you it was big! You can find out more about the NSLS II at http://www.bnl.gov/nsls2/ .
We also got a chance to go into the Relativisitc Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The RHIC is even bigger than the NSLS II so you can't even begin to take a photo of it, in fact, it took us 20 minutes in a car to drive around the inside circumference of ring!
The photo below is what's inside the ring of the RHIC and is where the magic happens. At RHIC scientists study what may have happened moments after the Big Bang that created the universe. Pretty cool eh?
When you smash a couple of protons together at high kinetic energy they explode to form quarks, which are then detected inside the RHIC. The example below shows what that looks like on a computer monitor. This is E=MC2 at work in real life folks. Lots more cool stuff about RHIC at http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/.
The review kept all of us busy so I didn't get as much of a chance to look around on Long Island as I would have liked, but I did get a chance one evening to go out to the town of East Hampton. Established in 1648, East Hampton is a picturesque town located at the eastern end of the South Shore of Long Island, and is the easternmost town in the state of New York.
After the high-tech wizardry of Brookhaven National Laboratory, East Hampton was like going back in time to a simpler period where wind mills were the advanced technology, and no one had even dreamed of E = MC2 yet!
The Atlantic Ocean beaches are a short distance away, and houses like the one in the photo below are right on the beach, and look right out into the ocean. Don't let its simple rustic looks fool you, it's worth millions of dollars!
This is view of the beach for the house in the photo above. Nice.
Houses like the one below line the beach front. I stopped at a Starbucks in town for a little coffee, and there was a real estate office located next to it. Houses like the one below sell for north of $30 million US, and get this, you can't buy insurance for them because of the storm damage that occurs every year. The residents are in a constant state of rebuilding the houses as storms blow through the area. Unbelievable!
After the review at Brookhaven concluded, I made a quick stop at the Long Island summer home of 26th president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, on the way to JFK airport.
Below is a photo of the house which my friend Pam is walking over to check out. We didn't have enough time to take a tour of the house before our flight, so we just walked around the grounds and through the museum. Those who did go through it told us they were very impressed, so if you get to Long Island be sure to go check out Teddy's house on the inside too. Next time.
The front view of the house.
The side view of the house.
There were some huge trees on the old estate!
The home of one of Teddy's sons was converted into a museum where you can go in and view movies about the Roosevelt family, see artificts and displays, and see what life was like during the Roosevelt days.
Here's one last photo of Teddy's house - thanks for stopping by!
