Over Labor Day weekend, I took Jay on the grand Northern MN tour, including a place that I had never been to before but have been wanting to see ever since I found out about: Soudan Underground Mine State Park. It's a mine! That you can tour! But wait, it gets better. There's also a physics lab! It turns out that the best place to study neutrinos is as far away from cosmic radiation as you can get, which just happens to be underground. And there just happened to be a retired mine in a convenient location for FermiLab to shoot neutrinos at. And so the University of Minnesota built a massive neutrino detector there. In the photo above, we're looking at the back of the detector. There's also a pretty fantastically detailed neutrino-themed mural on the right side. The neutrino experiment is pretty much done now, and they're moving onto to other experiments that can utilize the unique location.
We had to leave my place at 5 AM to get there in time for the tour, which was totally worth it. We wore hard hats and rode in a mineshaft elevator and learned about physics!
