RHIC on the Radio

Now here was a surprise. I was doing my occasional wanderings through that Internets thing trying to see if there was anything on RHIC out there in the media that I had missed. And lo, while I was poking around the WNYC website, I noticed a link to "Radiolab", a show I've heard advertised but never heard (a problem now solved for me with radioSHARK...), clicked on it, and found myself drawn to this quote:

A Simpler Time
Have you ever wished you could time travel, like in the movies? Artist Terry Wilcox asks us to imagine 1,594 years into the future, when his sculptural clock will chime. A particle accelerator jockey at Brookhaven National Laboratory takes us 45 feet away from the beginning of time. And Swedish producer Marcus Lindeen introduces us to David McDermott, an artist who devotes his life to ignoring the present.

"45 feet from the beginning of time"? Holy incompatible units, Batman (but maybe they just suppressed the "c", like pro physicists do?). Anyway, after a bit of fiddling around to find a link to the show which actually worked, I got to hear about RHIC on the radio.

The piece was unfortunately introduced by means of the aforementioned Terry Wilcox, who was worried about those "scientists at Stony Brook making a universe". OK, he missed hitting Brookhaven by about a 45 minute drive, and was attributing a scientific goal I haven't heard much of since Benford's sci-fi novel Cosm. But there we were, with Robert Krulwich interviewing one of my RHIC colleagues, Todd Satogata, about the collider. OK so a few details were botched (like RHIC colliding nuclei to study the properties of the early universe, and not protons), and some of the verbal imagery and sound effects made it sound like we were doing some serious universe creating around these parts. Still, overall I found the piece to have a surprisingly light touch and conveyed a lot of the enthusiasm we feel about our physics. Let's do some more fact-checking next time, Radiolab!