Science on a shoestring

On the other blog I would occasionally put out short notices of neat hacks (as always, "hack" in the "solving problems ingeniously" sense).  I recently ran across one that didn't have much to do with the web, so I thought I'd carry that tradition over to this blog.


Muons are subatomic particles similar to electrons but much heavier.  They are generally produced in high-energy interactions in particle accelerators or from cosmic rays slamming into the atmosphere.  Muons at rest take about 2 microseconds to decay, actually a pretty long time for an unstable particle.  Muons from cosmic ray collisions are moving fast enough that they take measurably longer to decay (in our reference frame), which is one of the many pieces of supporting evidence for special relativity.

The GRAPES-3 detector at Ooty in Tamil Nadu, India detects just such decays using an array of detectors set into a hill 2200m (7200 ft) above sea level.  The detectors themselves are made largely from recycled materials, particularly square metal pipes formerly used in construction projects in Japan.  The total annual budget for the project is under $400,000, but the team has already produced significant results.  Auntie has more details on the construction of the instruments here.

There are a couple of narratives that are often spun around stories like this.  One is a sort of condescending "Isn't that cute?" with maybe a reference to the Professor on Gilligan's Island building a radio out of coconuts.  Another is "Look what people can do without huge budgets.  Why do we need all these multi-billion-dollar projects anyway?"

I'd rather not tell either of those.  What I see here is highly skilled scientists making use of the resources they have available to produce significant results.  Their counterparts at CERN or whatever are making use of different resources to produce different significant results.  Both are moving the ball forward.  There have been plenty of neat hacks at CERN, including something called "HTTP",  but today I wanted to call out GRAPES-3, mainly because it's just plain cool.