Posts Tagged ‘particle physics’

The Nerdiest Marriage Proposal. Ever.

Saturday, July 16th, 2011

Yesterday, months of planning culminated into the world’s nerdiest marriage proposal.

I asked Kendra Snyder to marry me in the opened-up guts of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. (Where Kendra works as a science writer/communicator/public information officer-type.)

More specifically, I asked her on scaffolding below the center of RHIC’s 1,200-ton STAR detector. This house-sized machine examines the hot soup of energy present just moments after the Big Bang, which physicists recreate by colliding gold ions near the speed of light.

Make as many symbolic interpretations as you’d like — I chose the location for a lot of reasons! — but the truth is I wanted us to have a great story to tell. A ridiculously nerdy, epic and smile-prompting story.

So how did things go down? Here’s the skinny from each of our perspectives.

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The most amazing thing about the universe

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Kepler's supernova remnantLast weekend, Kendra and I had dinner and drinks with some friends. Put two nerds together, and we eventually get to talking about science…

One of my particular guilty pleasures is waxing poetic about our astoundingly meager place in the universe. It reliably makes my skin crawl. (Think that’s weird? Please subtract some points from your nerd score.)

So we somehow managed to corner our helpless guests with tall tales about what is known about space. Where spacecraft have visited and what they’ve observed; if we think life is out there, and where; when we’ll get to Mars, if ever; if any habitable planets are nearby; how large the universe is thought to be; where does matter come from; and so on.

As we threw back our beers at the local pub, one friend dropped the question any science enthusiast salivates over:

“What do you think is the most amazing thing about the universe?” (more…)