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Soudan Mine
barbara weibel
The Great Stalacpipe Organ CAVES are disorientating at the best of times, especially ones as baroque as Luray caverns, deep beneath Virginia’s Shenandoah valley. But as you descend underground, past Titania’s Veil (a gleaming white calcite formation), crossing Giant’s Hall and skirting the mirror surface of Dream Lake, you will hear an ethereal music start to fill the dripping hush. Soon it feels as if you are standing inside a marimba made of stone, in a setting designed by Salvador Dalí. The songs seem to come from all around, as if the cavern itself were singing. You have found the Great Stalacpipe Organ, a unique instrument that uses cave formations to make music. Conceived and built in the 1950s by mathematician Leland
Sprinkle, the organ produces tones using rubber-tipped mallets to strike stalactites as its keys are played. It took Sprinkle three years and 2500 tries to find the right 37 formations to serve as natural chimes, ranging over five octaves. The result is the world’s largest natural instrument, covering 1.4 hectares and using over 8 kilometres of wiring. It’s played daily through an automated system, and by an organist during the half-dozen or so weddings held there every year. Julian Smith Where: Luray, Virginia, 90 minutes’ drive west of Washington DC When: Open daily
You can get married to the sounds of the stalacpipe organ
Soudan Mine
SEVEN hundred metres below the mountainous terrain of Soudan, Minnesota, lurks part of one of the most important experiments in particle physics. A unique box of tricks designed to detect neutrinos beamed from Fermilab, about 725 kilometres away in Batavia, Illinois, is buried here. This sensitive experiment is sited deep down in this old iron mine to shield it from the “noise” of cosmic rays raining down on the Earth.
Neutrino physics inspired Gianetti’s massive mural iv | NewScientist | 10 April 2010
LEONARDI WALTER/GAMMA/camerapress
Star City
anil ananthaswamy
An unassuming home (above) for unique space memorabilia
I visited the mine to see the experiment for myself. Delving this far down into the Earth’s crust is a haunting experience. And the MINOS neutrino detector – 6000 tonnes of steel and plastic – is a sight to behold, towering above like something from the lair of a James Bond villain. But there’s another reason to come here. Far less well known but just as impressive is the mural adorning one of the walls. By Joseph Giannetti, this modern-day cave painting, 8 metres high and 18 metres wide, is an impressionistic celebration of the advances
in 20th-century neutrino physics, from Wolfgang Pauli’s theoretical insight that neutrinos should exist to crucial neutrino experiments humming away today. If art helps you contemplate the spirit of science, this may well be the most bizarre place you’ll ever do it. Anil Ananthaswamy Where: The mine is a short drive from Minneapolis. You can organise a tour with the Soudan Underground Mine State Park services When: Between the Memorial Day weekend (end of May) and the end of September
EVER since Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space in 1961, all Soviet and Russian cosmonauts have trained at the Gagarin Cosmonauts Training Centre at Star City. It was a highly guarded military facility during the Soviet era, and even in the mid-1990s red tape made it a nightmare to visit. Nowadays, several companies make life easy by offering guided tours. Compared to the slick NASA visitor centres, Star City, with its Khrushchev-era buildings, has a fascinating raw authenticity. The highlight is undoubtedly the training facilities, where you will see the giant tank where cosmonauts practise space walks under water, a mock-up of the Mir space station and a centrifuge that exposes budding cosmonauts to accelerations of up to 8 g. Star City also has a museum showcasing spacesuits, charred descent capsules and assorted Gagarin memorabilia, including the YG 1 number plate of the Rolls-Royce that drove him past ecstatic crowds in London three months after his first space flight. You can also visit a replica of Gagarin’s office, containing a book which crews still make a point of signing before every launch. If you’re lucky, you might even bump into a cosmonaut. I got to meet Sergei Avdeyev, who clocked up nearly 12,000 Earth orbits and 750 days aboard the Mir space station. For the brave of heart, some tour operators can also arrange a spell in the centrifuge or flights which simulate weightlessness. Hazel Muir Where: An hour’s drive north-east of Moscow (www.gctc.ru/eng) When: Open all year, except at weekends and on official Russian holidays. Permits are required to visit, so contact a tour operator well in advance. Be warned that winter temperatures can plummet below –20 °C
10 April 2010 | NewScientist | v
The Great Stalacpipe Organ CAVES are disorientating at the best of times, especially ones as baroque as Luray caverns, deep beneath Virginia’s Shenandoah valley. But as you descend underground, past Titania’s Veil (a gleaming white calcite formation), crossing Giant’s Hall and skirting the mirror surface of Dream Lake, you will hear an ethereal music start to fill the dripping hush. Soon it feels as if you are standing inside a marimba made of stone, in a setting designed by Salvador Dalí. The songs seem to come from all around, as if the cavern itself were singing. You have found the Great Stalacpipe Organ, a unique instrument that uses cave formations to make music. Conceived and built in the 1950s by mathematician Leland
Sprinkle, the organ produces tones using rubber-tipped mallets to strike stalactites as its keys are played. It took Sprinkle three years and 2500 tries to find the right 37 formations to serve as natural chimes, ranging over five octaves. The result is the world’s largest natural instrument, covering 1.4 hectares and using over 8 kilometres of wiring. It’s played daily through an automated system, and by an organist during the half-dozen or so weddings held there every year. Julian Smith Where: Luray, Virginia, 90 minutes’ drive west of Washington DC When: Open daily
You can get married to the sounds of the stalacpipe organ
Soudan Mine
SEVEN hundred metres below the mountainous terrain of Soudan, Minnesota, lurks part of one of the most important experiments in particle physics. A unique box of tricks designed to detect neutrinos beamed from Fermilab, about 725 kilometres away in Batavia, Illinois, is buried here. This sensitive experiment is sited deep down in this old iron mine to shield it from the “noise” of cosmic rays raining down on the Earth.
Neutrino physics inspired Gianetti’s massive mural iv | NewScientist | 10 April 2010
LEONARDI WALTER/GAMMA/camerapress
Star City
anil ananthaswamy
An unassuming home (above) for unique space memorabilia
I visited the mine to see the experiment for myself. Delving this far down into the Earth’s crust is a haunting experience. And the MINOS neutrino detector – 6000 tonnes of steel and plastic – is a sight to behold, towering above like something from the lair of a James Bond villain. But there’s another reason to come here. Far less well known but just as impressive is the mural adorning one of the walls. By Joseph Giannetti, this modern-day cave painting, 8 metres high and 18 metres wide, is an impressionistic celebration of the advances
in 20th-century neutrino physics, from Wolfgang Pauli’s theoretical insight that neutrinos should exist to crucial neutrino experiments humming away today. If art helps you contemplate the spirit of science, this may well be the most bizarre place you’ll ever do it. Anil Ananthaswamy Where: The mine is a short drive from Minneapolis. You can organise a tour with the Soudan Underground Mine State Park services When: Between the Memorial Day weekend (end of May) and the end of September
EVER since Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space in 1961, all Soviet and Russian cosmonauts have trained at the Gagarin Cosmonauts Training Centre at Star City. It was a highly guarded military facility during the Soviet era, and even in the mid-1990s red tape made it a nightmare to visit. Nowadays, several companies make life easy by offering guided tours. Compared to the slick NASA visitor centres, Star City, with its Khrushchev-era buildings, has a fascinating raw authenticity. The highlight is undoubtedly the training facilities, where you will see the giant tank where cosmonauts practise space walks under water, a mock-up of the Mir space station and a centrifuge that exposes budding cosmonauts to accelerations of up to 8 g. Star City also has a museum showcasing spacesuits, charred descent capsules and assorted Gagarin memorabilia, including the YG 1 number plate of the Rolls-Royce that drove him past ecstatic crowds in London three months after his first space flight. You can also visit a replica of Gagarin’s office, containing a book which crews still make a point of signing before every launch. If you’re lucky, you might even bump into a cosmonaut. I got to meet Sergei Avdeyev, who clocked up nearly 12,000 Earth orbits and 750 days aboard the Mir space station. For the brave of heart, some tour operators can also arrange a spell in the centrifuge or flights which simulate weightlessness. Hazel Muir Where: An hour’s drive north-east of Moscow (www.gctc.ru/eng) When: Open all year, except at weekends and on official Russian holidays. Permits are required to visit, so contact a tour operator well in advance. Be warned that winter temperatures can plummet below –20 °C
10 April 2010 | NewScientist | v