Inside, the only trace of the Hanford bunker's Cold War days is a big nuclear-disaster status board, straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Every 20 minutes, two aluminum rings silently and gracefully glide a quarter of the way around the cylinder's bottom.
Computers constantly crunch data coming from the cylinder.
Multiply two masses together and divide that number by the square of the distance between the two masses, and you have the gravitational attraction between the masses. But to get the figure for gravitational force, you must multiply the whole thing by Big G, a complicated, very esoteric number. And right now, that margin of error appears much larger than what scientists thought just six years ago. A dozen or so groups of scientists worldwide are trying to get a better grasp on what the number really is. Riley Newman and Mike Bantel from the University of California at Irvine spent five years designing and building the experimental equipment now inside the old Nike Ajax missile bunker that guarded Hanford's plutonium production facilities during the Cold War.