Is The Real-Life Upside Down At Argonne National Lab?

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4.6 • 924 Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2018

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Here at Nerdette, we've wanted to visit Argonne National Laboratory for MANY YEARS. Why? Because it's a massive research facility, it's just outside of Chicago, and it shares many similarities with Hawkins National Laboratory, the fictional government science complex from the Netflix show Stranger Things.

Greta, Tricia and our trusty guide Justin Breaux take a tour of Argonne, where we talk with a bunch of super-smart scientists about the stuff they're working on and the questions they're trying to answer. Questions like: If you had one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, what problems should you solve? And if you could solve those problems, how would you go about doing it? And what if one problem — a problem you've dedicated your entire career to solving — isn't solvable for centuries?

Also, can we see the Upside Down?

Guests:

Katherine Riley, director of science at Argonne’s Leadership Computing Facility
Rajesh Sankaran, computer scientist at Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science Division
Lei Cheng, chemist with Argonne's Joint Center for Energy Storage Research
Matt Dietrich, experimental physicist at Argonne's Physics Division

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still
0:06.1	watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,
0:12.7	soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,
0:18.0	Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago.
0:25.7	Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.
0:28.3	Listen wherever you get your podcast.
0:35.8	From WBEZ Chicago, this is Nerdette.
0:36.6	I'm Greta Johnson.
0:41.9	And I'm Trisha Bobita. Nerdat is a show where we talk to people who dare to ask big questions and explore the unknown.
0:52.9	Usually we do that in a recording studio. But this week, we are going out into the magical beyond and talking to some extremely smart humans who work at Argonne National Laboratory.
0:54.5	Oh, I'm really speeding.
1:00.0	This is a place that Trisha and I have wanted to go to ever since we started this podcast.
1:01.2	It's happening.
1:02.6	Welcome to Argonne.
1:03.1	Wow.
1:09.2	Argon is a massive research facility outside of Chicago, run by the U.S. Department of Energy.
1:10.1	Look at it.
1:11.3	Holy shit. Whoa. Science is in. Look at it. Holy shi.
1:12.3	Whoa!
1:13.3	Science is in there. What are the weird shapes on top?
1:15.2	Science.
1:15.9	It's one of ten national labs in the United States, and it is enormous.
	...

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