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Science rocks! Once in a while my scientific adventures go on screen in Swedish Television. In 1986 the organisers of the 48 000 crown quiz got out of their minds, thinking an 18-year old youngster answering questions about particle physics should attract a wide audience. And they were astonishingly right! In the final round 4.4 million Swedes watched yours truly identifying bubble chamber pictures and Feynman diagrams with discoveries of various elementary particles. Having got only 7 of the required 8 correct answers I finally got a helpful hint from the judges and happily declared that the discovery of Omega minus was evident from the nature of the tracks shown in Figure 3. Wild excitement over the country and Jon Bon Jovi was among the first to congratulate! Besides the then not so modest cash prize I received a guest of honour ticket to the Nobel Prize ceremony, taking place 4 days later. Like in a dream I was talking to the inventors of electron and tunnel microscopes, while media of all kinds were shooting pictures of my borrowed tuxido. A book collecting important events of the year put my dancing with Adrienne de Champs on par with Wole Soyinka's literature prize. Maybe I am not the only mad person in Sweden! Many years later I got the idea that burning plutonium nitride in Studsvik's research reactor would be a nice thing to do. Nice enough that the European Commission agreed to fund the project with one million Euro. The infamous Bo Holmström helped informing the public about the promise of a nuclear waste free future in a newsitem broadcasted in TV4 in June 2003. In time for Christmas the same year, our Swiss colleagues delivered their gift in form of four fuel pins filled with 20 grams of deadly plutonium. While waiting for Studsvik to get the experiment started, Aktuellt on SVT got on the track and pictured me closer to a stack of plutonium than most people ever will get. |
Last update 2004-07-12 by Janne Wallenius |
