The Quiet Zone

A 13,000-square-mile rectangle across West Virginia and Virginia where radio transmission is restricted by law, to protect the Green Bank Observatory’s giant dish, the largest fully steerable radio telescope on Earth. In the core zone there is no mobile signal, and Wi-Fi and even microwave ovens are regulated; the observatory runs a truck that hunts down stray interference. People with electromagnetic hypersensitivity have moved here deliberately. It is one of the genuinely strange places in America: modern, deliberate, and almost entirely silent on the spectrum. PUBLIC science centre and tours.