The Ultimate Geek Road Trip
28:04 minutes
For most people, a road trip means sun, sky, sea, and sand. We at SciFri like those things too, but we’ll take our sightseeing with an extra side of science. Why not jump in the car for a trip to Holmdel, New Jersey’s Horn Antenna, where the detection of cosmic microwave background radiation confirmed the Big Bang? Or maybe you’d prefer to get your nerd on with a trip to Arco, Idaho, the first town ever powered by nuclear energy. The Geek Atlas author John Graham-Cumming joins Ira on-air to help us plot the ultimate geek road trip, spanning sites key to the history of science, technology, and mathematics. Plus, computer scientist Randal Olson weighs in with an algorithm to optimize your road trip route. Read an excerpt from The Geek Atlas here.
We also asked you for your top science and tech destinations—and you delivered! Check out the suggestions on the interactive map above. Randal Olson optimized our road trip route (in blue) using a genetic algorithm. Read about how he did it here.
Finally, take a peek at one of John Graham-Cumming’s recommended sites, the John M. Mossman Lock Collection in midtown Manhattan, in this SciFri video from 2013:
Segment Guests
John Graham-Cumming
John Graham-Cumming is a programmer and author of The Geek Atlas (O’Reilly, 2009) based in London, England.
Randal Olson
Randal Olson is a computer scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Meet the Producer
About Annie Minoff
@annieminoffAnnie Minoff is a producer for The Journal from Gimlet Media and the Wall Street Journal, and a former co-host and producer of Undiscovered. She also plays the banjo.