After spending three years as a graduate student at Fermilab, Federico Izraelevitch decided to take the long way home to his native Argentina—by van.
In addition to his wife and three dogs, Izraelevitch brought along 10 identical cosmic-ray detectors. He dropped off eight of them along the way, at universities in seven Latin American nations: Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia (home to two of the schools), Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. At each stop on the six-month road trip he completed in February, he spent about five days showing physics students how to use the instruments, which were designed to detect muons but could also be adapted to find neutrinos. Some of the groups want to explore space weather, and others will search for gamma-ray bursts, he says. The hosting institutions put him and his entourage up while there.
Izraelevitch named his travels the Escaramujo Project, after the title of...
