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Pictorial Tour of World's Longest Linear Accelerator

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the always-with-the-measuring-contest dept.

Wired has a great pictorial tour of their recent visit to Stanford University's linear accelerator, the longest in the world. The accelerator has been the vehicle upon which three Nobel Prizes were earned and a the next big project will boast an electron laser roughly 10 billion times more powerful than existing x-ray sources.

5 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Crazy tag by Yoweigh116 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    What is up with this crazy tag attached to the story?

    songofthetwomilelinearparticleacceleratorstanforduniversity Doesn't it defeat the purpose of a tagging system entirely if every article has unique tags?
  2. Poor Johnny! by DoctorSVD · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Am I the only one who feels that the authors treated Johnny on a callous and cruel manner?

  3. A few corrections... by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator...are currently amassing the first scientific evidence that there is more matter than antimatter in the universe

    That is just plain wrong. They are studying CP violation which is the difference between matter and anti-matter this might help to explain the huge excess of matter over antimatter that astronomers already observe in the Universe but it is known the the effects we understand today with B and K mesons (which is what they are studying) cannot explain it by itself.

    Secondly they are NOT the first to observe CP violation by a long shot. It was first discovered in Kaons by Christenson, Cronin, Fitch and Turlay at Brookhaven in 1964 a discovery for which they won the Nobel prize.

  4. Re:Scientists and cable management? by arminw · · Score: 2, Insightful

    .....wires and tubes left dragging everywhere.........

    Keep in mind that these are short term experiments, not long term, installations. The more permanent parts of the accelerator itself are much more orderly, just as in a good data center.

    --
    All theory is gray
  5. Re:SLAC is great, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, it is when you consider that the money is being wasted on useless wars.

    On the other hand, given a limited overall science budget, it is doubtful to me that physics mega-projects should continue being supported in the way they have been. Biology, chemistry, math, and computer science yield a lot more useful results per dollar. Well, okay, maybe Congress found it necessary to cut $88 million out of the high energy physics budget to pay for Bush's useless wars. Sure, I could probably that.

    But if that's so, then how the hell did the same Congress find it possible to lard $19 BILLION of new earmarks (a.k.a. pork) into the budget?!?

    If they could cut back the Bridge to Nowhere and other pork by just 5%, then there would be more than enough money for SLAC, Fermilab, etc. But instead of cutting wasteful pork by only 5%, they choose to cut high energy physics much deeper and sell out the future of science in the US.