Mad Hatter Day
The holiday for nonsense was invented in Boulder in 1986. The town has been taking Wonderland seriously ever since.
Wonderland is in the 303.
Boulder gave the Hatter his holiday. It also froze atoms into a single quantum state, built clocks that make Time look careless, and produced four Nobel laureates in eleven years. By the Hatter’s standards, it may be the maddest town on Earth.
A group of computer technicians in Boulder read the 10/6 tag on the Hatter’s hat as a date and declared October 6 a day of silliness. By 1988 it had national press.
At JILA, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman cooled rubidium atoms to 170 billionths of a kelvin and made the first Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter Einstein predicted in 1925.
Between 2001 and 2012, NIST Boulder and JILA produced four Nobel laureates in physics: Cornell, Wieman, John Hall and David Wineland. Their methods sit underneath Colorado’s quantum companies today.
NIST Boulder’s optical clocks are accurate to about one part in a quintillion, precise enough to register the change in gravity across a centimetre of height. Its radio station near Fort Collins sets clocks across the country.
Trapped ions, neutral atoms, frequency combs: techniques born at JILA and NIST Boulder now show up in companies along the Front Range, including Infleqtion, Quantinuum and Atom Computing.
The Mad Tea-Party, peer reviewed.
Read Chapter VII in Boulder and the nonsense starts to look like a research programme.
He sang so badly at the Queen’s concert that she accused him of murdering the time. Time took offence and stopped, so it is always six o’clock and always tea-time.
NIST keeps the nation’s time. Its optical clocks are precise enough to detect the change in gravity across a single centimetre of height, and its radio station near Fort Collins sets clocks across the country.
The Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse crowd into one corner of a long, mostly empty table and tell Alice there’s nowhere to sit.
In 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman cooled rubidium atoms at JILA to 170 billionths of a kelvin, until thousands of them shared a single quantum state: the first Bose-Einstein condensate. Everyone in the same seat.
The date is a price tag.
In John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Hatter wears a tall top hat with a slip of paper tucked in the band. It reads In this style 10/6.
That’s ten shillings and sixpence, the price of the hat. He’s a hatter, the hat is for sale, and he never took it off. Read as a date, 10/6 is October 6, six months after April Fools’ Day.
The book never calls him the Mad Hatter, either. He’s just the Hatter. Readers added the “Mad” from an older saying, often linked to the mercury hat makers used on felt.
On July 4, an Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson makes up a story on a rowing trip for three sisters. Alice Liddell asks him to write it down.
The book is published under the name Lewis Carroll. Tenniel draws the Hatter at a tea party where it is always six o’clock.
A group of computer technicians in Boulder notice that 10/6 looks like a date, and declare October 6 a day of silliness.
The holiday gets national press coverage. A price tag from Victorian London now has a day of its own, courtesy of Colorado.
Small facts, served with tea.
Boulder sits about a mile up, so water boils at roughly 95°C instead of 100°C. A Boulder tea party is, scientifically, a slightly lukewarm one.
Clocks tick faster the higher they sit. Over eighty years, someone in Boulder ages about half a millisecond more than someone in Oxford. NIST’s clocks can measure the difference.
The boat trip where Alice’s story began was in 1862. JILA, where the first condensate was made, was founded in Boulder in April 1962. A hundred years apart.
The Hatter’s watch shows the day of the month, not the hour. It runs two days wrong because the March Hare fixed it with butter. “It was the best butter.”
“Mad as a hatter” and “mad as a March hare” were both common sayings before Carroll. He sat both of them at the same tea party.
The Dormouse tells a story about three sisters, Elsie, Lacie and Tillie, who live in a treacle well. They are the three Liddell sisters in disguise. Lacie is an anagram of Alice.
John Tenniel was the principal cartoonist at Punch. He disliked how his drawings were printed in the first 1865 run, so it was withdrawn and reprinted.
NIST’s radio station WWVB, near Fort Collins, broadcasts the time at 60 kHz. Millions of “atomic” wall clocks and watches quietly set themselves from it every night.
The first Bose-Einstein condensate appeared at JILA on June 5, 1995. Every other day of the year is its unbirthday.
Be silly on purpose.
Boulder started it. Here are a few ways to honour the town that did.
Tuck a 10/6 tag in the band. Leave it on all day.
NIST will confirm the time. Then act as if it stays six o’clock all evening.
Mid-meeting, everyone shifts one seat along. Nobody explains why.
Odds are 364 to 1 that it is.
The Hatter’s original works best. See below.
The Hatter asks it and admits he has no idea. Carroll didn’t either. After years of letters, he offered one in an 1896 preface: a raven can produce a few notes, though they are very flat, and it is “nevar” put with the wrong end in front. Read “nevar” backwards.