Bill Harlan: Ties don’t lead to a Nobel Prize

By Bill Harlan, Journal staff

This is the story of my unsung contribution to the 2002 Nobel Prize for physics.

I relate this tale as the final installment of my week-long series on the competition for a national underground laboratory. Homestake gold mine in Lead is in the running. So are three other sites. Blah, blah, blah.

Enough of that. My notebooks, recorders and cameras have been emptied of hard data. Now I turn to my deepest memory banks, where fact and fiction oscillate like photons and anti-photons on the reality-horizon of a black hole.

The saga begins shortly after the Big Bang n in 1967, if memory serves -- when I was working as a laborer deep underground at the Homestake.

On this particular day, another worker and I were a pick-and-shovel team working in a dead-end “drift,” or tunnel. Our assignment was to replace railroad ties on a bumpy spur of the narrow-gauge railway that runs throughout the mine.

The rail spur in this short drift was on “the 4850.” In mine parlance, that’s a “level” that’s 4,850 feet underground. The depth matters for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s necessary to understand the significance of a remark my fellow laborer made. At the time, I was a college student on hiatus. My partner was a middle-aged North Dakota farmer with a Lawrence Welk accent -- who, I probably don’t need to add, could work circles around me.

The drift was hot, humid and dark n the only illumination coming from the headlamps on our hardhats and from a few light bulbs a hundred feet away at the far end of the drift.
Another important fact: It was the nightshift.

During a short break, my partner turned to me and said something I’ve never forgotten: “I bet it doesn’t get much lighter down here on dayshift.”

I swear I’m not making that up.

By now, however, you’re probably thinking this story is a long way from an acceptance speech in Stockholm, so I’ll condense the next 35 years.

My colleague and I were working on the railroad track leading to a large device that gold miners called “the neutrino tank.”

Brookhaven National Laboratory researcher Ray Davis n a chemist, actually n figured that a tank filled with 100,000 gallons of dry-cleaning fluid, hooked to photoelectric sensors and protected from cosmic radiation by almost a mile of solid rock, could detect neutrinos produced in the sun.

Davis was right, and in 2002 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The discoveries he made in his “neutrino tank” n- thanks in part to smooth rail service -- continue to reverberate in astrophysics.

Which brings me to the second reason “the 4850” is important. That’s where a consortium of scientists and the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority want to put an “interim” underground science laboratory, in advance of a deeper lab 7,400 feet underground.

All of which hinges on a decision the National Science Foundation will make in the next few weeks.

Will the NSF pick Homestake, with its great depth?

Will it pick the Henderson molybdenum mine in Colorado, with its modern infrastructure?

The Pioneer Tunnel in Washington, with its horizontal access?

The Soudan iron mine in Minnesota, with its up-and-running lab?

During interviews for my fact-based stories, scientists and other experts declined to handicap the race, at least for the record. Being human, however, in unguarded, off-the-record moments, scientists do speculate.

Based on a couple dozen interviews at all four sites, and after a review of hundreds of pages of public documents from the four proposals and from the NSF, I’d give a slight edge to Homestake.

I offer that conclusion with a caveat on observer bias. I’ve tried to be objective in stories about each site, but the truth is, it’s fun covering underground science. If the NSF doesn’t choose Homestake, I’ll have less fun.

Also, readers should note a theory called the “NSF uncertainty principle.” As one scientist told me, “You never know what the NSF is going to think is important.”

In that case, maybe I should mention again that in the drift on the 4850 leading to the cavern that once contained Ray Davis’s neutrino tank, there is an extremely smooth stretch of narrow-gage rail line.

A small thing, you might say, but particle physics is all about small things, which brings me back to my contribution to physics and to the 1960s.

When my track-repairing partner speculated that this drift -- 4,850 feet underground n probably didn’t get much lighter in daytime, I was speechless. But not for long. Over the next three or four decades I got a lot of mileage out of that story. It was my very own “North Dakota joke”!

Then, a few years ago, I began thinking about the story in a new way. What if my track-laying pal had been telling a mirror version of the same story all these years? (“So then I tell this college kid, ‘Bet it doesn’t get much lighter down here …’).

Ouch. I guess it’s just as well I wasn’t invited to Stockholm.

For a comparison of all four sites being considered, go to www.rapidcityjournal.com/features/snews/mines/.
For updates and reports from reporter Bill Harlan about the selection process and his travels to the four sites, visit The Final Four of Physics blog at http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/blogs/mines/
Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or at bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com