Ray Bunker

speaker

91 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 26 Jun

Ray Bunker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Science Show · How bird brains help us understand human brains, and how eugenics had as much hand in the birth control movement as did feminism · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

And that's why we have to change clothes once again.

The mining gear comes off, and everyone has to take a shower so that we don't bring bits of radioactive dirt with us as we enter the lab.

They're especially adamant that everyone washes their hair.

Apparently your hair can be a real hornet's nest of radioactive dirt.

You might remember going to the doctor or the dentist and getting an x-ray, and being given a lead apron to protect whatever part of you wasn't being x-rayed.

Well, here it's the other way around.

You're the object that's emitting too much radiation, and the concern is that you will contaminate the lab.

Now that we've scrubbed ourselves down and put on clean lab clothes, we can tour the laboratory, greatly expanded since my previous visit almost 30 years ago.

Try to picture a rabbit warren scaled up to the size of a small village.

There are cavern-like chambers filled with lab equipment of every description, control rooms with banks of computer terminals, and dozens of scientists going about their work.

Our first stop is an experiment designed to snare particles of dark matter.

So now we're in the corner of the ladder labs where the SuperCDMS dark matter experiment is located.

That's the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search.

Bunker is showing us an experiment called SuperCDMS, designed to detect particles of dark matter.

Not that you could tell what it's for from its appearance.

At the time of my visit, they were still working on the outer layers of shielding for the experiment, so it basically looked like an enormous metal cylinder, several meters high and just as wide, and partially hidden behind some pipes and scaffolding.

Deep inside the metal cylinder are the germanium and silicon crystals that act as a target for dark matter particles.

And those crystals have to be kept cold, and I mean really cold, to minimize so-called thermal noise.

And that explains the loud, pulsating sound that fills the entire chamber.

The noise is coming from machines called pulse tube coolers, which push high-pressure liquid helium through pipes

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