Bubble Chambers, what are they?
It was a fun time this past week as my family came to visit me at work. I love those days. Mostly because I feel there is more connection with why I’m gone most days. If your kids and my kids are anything alike, they ask questions “why can’t you take me to this activity or that?” and My answer is sometimes “because I have to work”. Not fun conversations for a dad. So, when the opportunities exist to share my place of work with them, I feel it’s a stronger bond.
That’s cool and all, but what about bubble chambers?
Okay, okay. Let me share the importance of the situation even more. The cleaning industry has a great advantage for the workers. In that, every cleaner has the situation open to them to see another world. Yes, the job can be monotonic. The job also has the potential for growth into a huge number of industries.
Have you ever heard of Sidney Weinberg; the man went from a Janitor’s assistant to a leader on Wall Street. How about Richard Montanez, went from moping floors to being a leader Frito-Lay and originator of Flaming Hot Cheetos (so yummy). And how about Gail Evans, also went from cleaning buildings at Eastman Kodak to now a global chief information officer at Mercer (super large HR firm). There are just three, there are so many more.
The point here is the cleaning industry touches every other industry and to limit the exposure of workers to what they bring to the table is limiting humanity. Organizations and leaders need to take the opportunity to share what they are cleaning, why they are cleaning, and the effect they have on the host organization. In doing so you could be feeding the imagination and drive of a cleaning industry person to want to try other adventures. Because, and the big because, is that some cleaners are using the job as a steppingstone, and we need to honor that. Encourage it rather. Be the company that changes lives instead of just changing toilet paper.
Now for the bubble chambers and the visit, and how this prompted this post.
I currently work at Fermilab National Laboratory, I see our cleaner (Carmen) everyday around 9am. She is polite and we try to converse in Spanish, hers native and mine horrible. She cleans other buildings in the lab as well. And here is the cool part, she and her coworkers can see all the stuff scientists are working on. Imagine the questions she has. Probably the same questions I had when I visited the Education Center in the lab with my family last week. The fun comment from my son was “does this work with regular bubbles?”, you know the everyday bubbles kids play with. I love their connections to their lives.
“does this work with regular bubbles?”
In comes the coolest looking device I’ve seen. So, cool I just want to mount it on my Harley. It’s the bubble chamber, a device that was invented in 1952 by Donald Glaser. In short, and I’m sure scientists will pile on the comments (that’s okay), it superheats liquids and changes its physical state, then they pass particles through the device and liquid and track the bubbles. With this they can detect: the velocity a particle is going, the curvature to the momentum, and the charge of the particle. These devices have been vital to the discovery of the W & Z bosons, and now revitalized to be used in dark matter experiments. See below for a much larger bubble chamber.
Imagine walking by and dusting a device that has such a dramatic impact on science. Imagine what that cleaner will see tomorrow. We could have the next noble prize winner right under our noses if we could just share with them the industry, they impact every day.
References
Elkins, K. (2018, March 27). How Richard Montanez says he went from the factory floor to an exec at PepsiCo. Retrieved from CNBC Make It: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/a-janitor-invented-flamin-hot-cheetos-and-became-a-pepsico-exec.html
Montag, A. (2017, September 21). How a janitor went from cleaning floors to the C-suite as a 6-figure tech exec. Retrieved from CNBC Make It: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/21/gail-evans-went-from-janitor-to-executive-at-microsoft-and-mercer.html
Tietz, T. (2016, September 21). Donald Glaser and the Bubble Chamber. Retrieved from SciHi Blog: http://scihi.org/donald-glaser/
Wyatt, C. (2019, October 19). From Janitor to CEO: The Ultimate Rags to Riches Story. Retrieved from Business Barrage: https://businessbarrage.com/2019/10/10/from-janitor-to-ceo-the-ultimate-rags-to-riches-story/
