The Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector is a physics experiment the size of a 15-story building buried under a mountain in Japan. The detector is full of ultra-pure water, which can leach the nutrients out of your hair and dissolve metal.
#one of my favourite stories is how they installed all the pmt's (the gold things)#they filled it very slowly whilst some grad students and engineers sat in a boat and rowed it around and gradually installed the pmts#though at one point when it got to aboht halfway full one of the pmt's broke#It then preceeded to send a shock wave through the water and caused any pmt's that we're submerged to shatter#needless to say that wasn't a great day and we've learned to make less shatterable things#the real kicker is these things are fucking expensive (and surprisingly big!) and I think the glass involved was hand blown#they then had to drain the whole thing and sweep up the glass and redistribute the remaining ones (with shock proof sleeves)#eventually they got enough pmt's manufactured they could actually operate at full pmt capacity#but honestly what an l#also in the tweet 'it can help scientists detect dying stars' is true but what a dramatic way to put it#when a star dies it outputs a shit tonne of neutrinos at a specific energy range and then all the neutrino detectors get a rate uptick#OHOHOH it's a part of SNEWS which is pronounced 'snooze' along with some other neutrino detectors like IceCube (please let me talk about#IceCube please...) and SNEWS is SuperNovaEarlyWarningSystem#Sorry I'm getting carried away talking about neutrinos I'll stop now
@dragonsareimagining YOU GET THE FUCK BACK HERE AND START TALKING ABOUT ICE CUBE RIGHT FUCKING NOW DO NOT EDGE ME WITH SCIENCE LIKE THIS
I adore every single person who has indulged my nerding out on this post but also nobody is appreciating how silly the boat thing is
like, look at these nerds:
(it also puts how big super-k is into perspective)
ANYWAY ICECUBE MAY NOT BE SUPER-K BUT IT IS SUPER COOL
(literally, it's at the south pole)
IceCube is one of the few physics experiments with a cool name that isn't a hilariously tortured acronym (see: ATLAS, COBRA, NOvA, etc)
It does look hella evil, however:
this is clearly a supervillan lair
though some scientists are locked in here for months at a time over the winter period with no natural sunlight and just other scientists for company so I wouldn't be surprised if an actual supervillan came out of here
