Informational Design guru Edward Tufte will be at Fermilab in Illinois tonight at a reception for the Edward Tufte Celebrates Richard Feynman art exhibit. Tufte's three dimensional steel sculptures are built in the shape of Feynman's diagrams. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and star of the wonderful book Tuva or Bust! created these pictorial representations of subatomic particle behavior. Tufte's work emphasizes their inherent beauty.

Fermilab, like the Tufte exhibit, is an intersection of art, science and nature.   
Named for Physicist Enrico Fermi, the lab contains the Tevatron, once the world's largest particle accelerator. It is housed in a circular tunnel with a 4-mile circumference, 30 feet underground below the ring visible on the map and showing up clearly on the aerial photos. The Tevatron has been replaced by the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The lab also features numerous other research facilities, bike trails, open prairie and a herd of buffalo. It shows up on aerial photography as a remarkably open space in the middle of the sprawl of metro Chicago.
The reception is from 5-7 PM tonight and there are still tickets (no charge) available. If you're in the Chicagoland area, this would be nice opportunity to meet Tufte and see the fascinating Fermilab campus.