Qualla: Fermilab https://qualla.com/fermilab en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:15 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/d/p/3/j/fermilab-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Fermilab https://qualla.com/fermilab Fermilab: Introduction https://qualla.com/fermilab/ Photo credit Marcin Klapczynski, CC BY-SA 3.0. From two miles up, the circles are unmistakable: two enormous rings etched into the Illinois prairie west of Chicago, one inside the other, like the world's largest bull's-eye. These are the accelerator tunnels of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where protons have been smashed together at nearly the speed of light since 1972. But what catches the eye just as quickly is the herd of American bison grazing the grassland directly above the buried ring. The juxtaposition is deliberate. Fermilab's founding director, Robert Rathbun Wilson, a rancher's son from Wyoming, insisted that a laboratory probing the deepest questions of physics should also honor the land it occupied. He brought the first bison to the site in 1967 and launched a prairie restoration that eventually returned nearly 1,000 acres of tallgrass to what had been fallow farmland.

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Image: Marcin Klapczynski | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/p/3/j/fermilab-wp/dp3j-fermilab-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Fermilab: A Village Voted Out of Existence https://qualla.com/fermilab/ Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Kowalow at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 3.0. Fermilab sits on 6,800 acres outside Batavia, Illinois, about 34 miles west of downtown Chicago. The land was not empty when the government came looking. Weston, Illinois, was a small community next to Batavia whose village board voted the town out of existence in 1966 to make wa...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Kowalow at wts wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/p/3/j/fermilab-wp/dp3j-fermilab-a-village-voted-out-of-existence.mp3 0:06 2 full Fermilab: The Cathedral of Science https://qualla.com/fermilab/ Photo credit H Padleckas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wilson was a physicist, but also a sculptor and self-taught architect, and he refused to let Fermilab look like a cluster of concrete bunkers. The laboratory's 16-story headquarters, Wilson Hall, was inspired by the soaring nave of St. Pierre's Cathedral in Beauvais, France, rend...

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Image: H Padleckas | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/p/3/j/fermilab-wp/dp3j-fermilab-the-cathedral-of-science.mp3 0:06 3 full Fermilab: Smashing Records Underground https://qualla.com/fermilab/ Photo credit Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. Fermilab's original workhorse was the Tevatron, a ring 3.9 miles in circumference that, until the Large Hadron Collider started up near Geneva in 2008, was the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth. The Tevatron collided protons and antiprotons at energies up to 1.96 trilli...

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Image: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/p/3/j/fermilab-wp/dp3j-fermilab-smashing-records-underground.mp3 0:06 4 full Fermilab: Chasing Ghosts Through the Earth https://qualla.com/fermilab/ Photo credit Z22, CC BY-SA 4.0. Fermilab's future centers on neutrinos, the ghostly particles that pass through ordinary matter almost without interacting. The lab is building the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, which will fire the world's most intense neutrino beam from Batavia to a massive liqu...

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Image: Z22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/p/3/j/fermilab-wp/dp3j-fermilab-chasing-ghosts-through-the-earth.mp3 0:06 5 full Fermilab: Bison, Barn Owls, and the Prairie Ring https://qualla.com/fermilab/ Photo credit Elliott McCrory, CC BY-SA 4.0. Above the accelerator tunnels, Fermilab maintains one of the largest tallgrass prairie restorations in the state. Beginning in 1975, the Fermilab Prairie Committee began converting fallow agricultural land back to native grasses. By 2000, twenty-five plantings covered nearly 1,00...

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Image: Elliott McCrory | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/p/3/j/fermilab-wp/dp3j-fermilab-bison-barn-owls-and-the-prairie-ring.mp3 0:06 6 full