Thrifty Dick's got a new way to greet folks around the round table at his Monday night beer club. Reaching into the pocket of his jeans, he coyly offers, "Hey, I saved a neutrino for you." Pulling his hand from his pocket, he grimaces. "Oops, got away."
Mention Dick Wildberger's name to almost any Midwest Mountaineering
employee and they might shake their heads and look confused for
a moment. "Isn't he chasing neutrinos now?" they ask.
"Or working for the University physics department?"
For the past two decades, the balding, 44-year-old Wildberger,
known to many outdoor enthusiasts in the Twin Cities as Thrifty
Dick, has been an institution at the cramped and cluttered Thrifty
Outfitters store above Midwest Mountaineering on the West Bank
in Minneapolis. Even the newest employees have heard of his infamous
hot food parties and seen his slow, drawn out and dryly-comic
presentations during staff training. He wasn't the boss, but the
soft-spoken, bearded guy how was, it seemed, a permanent fixture
among the other strange paraphernalia at the store--the pink "dirty
flamingo" doll hanging above the stairway, the strange and
sometimes unbelievable newspaper articles that plaster the walls.
Seated around tables at Tracy's Bar on Franklin Avenue, Midwest
Mountaineering employees were a bit surprised by Thrifty Dick's
sudden departure in April for a new career at the University of
Minnesota. Instead of selling carabiners, rope and boots, or sewing
Gore-Tex jackets and mending zippers, Wildberger is helping to
build the world's most advanced neutrino detector, a device that
could help scientists unlock secrets of the universe.
"He can fix anything and we miss that," Steve Anderson,
the new manager of Thrifty Outfitters, laments over his beer.
It's his ability to fix things--almost anything--that landed the
self effacing Wildberger his new job. He is a handyman, a clever
inventor who takes things apart, puts them together, and constructs
them out of whatever materials are available. ON a recent trip
to Haiti where he volunteered to build hoses for poor families,
Wildberger took apart the carburetor of a motorcycle and rebuilt
it with nothing more than a screwdriver and 10mm socket.
"The socket broke then, so we fixed that too," Wildberger
recalls matter-of-factly, adding, "There is an attitude there
about how to get around things that are broken."
Coincidentally, Nathaniel Pearson, the factory manager for the University's MINOS project, (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) was on the same volunteer trip to Haiti. Pearson says his interest in Dick was piqued when he saw Wildberger reading Scientific American on the flight, and again, on witnessing Wildberger's ingenuity first-hand in Haiti. After the trip, he asked Wildberger to come over and check out MINOS, the University's $56 million physics project.
Half-mile below ground at the Soudan Iron Mine in Northern Minnesota,
the U of M School of Physics and Astronomy is constructing a 6,000-ton
machine to catch subatomic particles known as neutrino. Beginning
in 2003, a beam of neutrinos will be shot in a steady stream from
the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory west of Chicago, through
the earth to the MINOS detector, a subterranean journey of some
450 miles.
Researchers hope the MINOS experiment will help to prove that
neutrinos-uncharged particles 100,000 times smaller than electrons,
have mass. If they do indeed have mass, their research could help
to answer one of the fundamental questions of the universe, according
to U of M Physics professor Earl Peterson.
Like electrons, neutrons and protons,
neutrinos make up the building blocks of the universe. In the
past, physicists had theorized that neutrinos had no mass. The
particles are so small--they can pass through the nucleus of an
atom without hitting anything--that they are difficult to detect,
let alone measure.
But Peterson and other scientists
now suspect that neutrinos could account for much of the 10 to
20 percent of missing, or dark, mass in the universe. Determining
if neutrinos have mass will help explain why the universe looks
the way it does.
"It clarifies the picture
of how the universe was formed, how the galaxies clumped together,
the lumpiness of the universe," Peterson explains. Scientists
consider the information so important that similar experiments
are planned at laboratories worldwide.
For a guy like Wildberger, with
a life-long interest in science and a boundless sense of curiosity,
the opportunity to play a part in the MINOS project seemed to
good to pass up. "When I saw the job description I thought,
'Holy shit! This is neat. I must have this job."
Workers began excavating a cavern
big enough to house the neutrino detector on the 27th level of
the Soudan mine, located west of Ely, about a year ago. When assembled
the detector will be made up of 506 one-inch-thick steel octagons,
each about eight meters wide, hanging in two rows some 50 feet
across. Once the particle stream is flowing, scientists will track
how many neutrinos collide with the steel panels. Peterson says
they only expect to observe a single collision every 20 minutes
or so. The experiment is expected to continue for about four years.
Here, at the Twin Cities campus,
Wildberger and others are busy in the basement of the Tate Laboratory
of Physics building the factory needed to build the detector.
Pearson, who manages the factory, says Wildberger seemed a perfect
fit for the team of 30 students and three full-time workers.
"Dick's the perfect guy because
he knows how to make things, he's easy going, and he knows how
to manage people," Pearson adds.
The ability to fix and invent unconventional
apparatus is critical to the project, agrees Peterson, who is
heading up the University's efforts in Soudan. Many of the workers
on the Soudan station were previously construction workers or
carpenters familiar with tools and experienced in conceptualizing
spatial problems.
"A lot of what we do is very
technical, but when you break things down to step A, B, and C,
you get into the swing of things and learn the steps and the physics
behind them pretty quickly," Peterson says.
Wildberger seems as much in his
element in the world of science as he was at Thrifty Outfitters.
The store, with its three-foot-tall Campbell's Soup can and tired
looking 1970's vintage frame pack, is not so different from the
machine shop at the University where the walls are covered with
racks holding screwdrivers and wrenches, the floor is littered
with metal shavings, and voices drift down the hard-floored hallways.
Tools here are accurate to within a 1/10,000 of an inch; inventiveness
and problem solving are prized skills.
While Wildberger's transition from outfitting campers to outfitting a neutrino collecting facility may seem significant to his friends, the move hasn't changed Thrifty Dick much at all. Except for, of course, what he's got in his pocket.