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Pictorial Tour of World's Longest Linear Accelerator
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.
...which merely leaves you going in circles.
Though I suspect the taxi driver was padding the fare.
125 staff members at SLAC have been let go this year (so far), and 200 projected layoffs at Fermilab by the end of the summer. Wired has the fuller scoop.
I can has sig?
I worked at slac for some 6 months and i remember them telling me they solved the big bang during the interview and they could see sub atomic particles visually. It was a pretty cool place, with posters from the 60's all over the place that had been there since the 60's. I actually worked with the guy who made the first cgi-script web page and he was telling me about mosaic how you had to cut and paste the link into the location adress instead of clicking on it. There was also a very weird office with all kinds of interesting old posters and I remember a book titled "quantum mechanics" by messiah. They also had a room labeled "Retire" that had a bed in it for taking naps, of which I did utilize. Seems as if they fill up an oracle grid cluster full of data from the detectors and mine the data to figure out how it all works. They were the slowest most laid back people I've ever seen. Just getting a white board installed was a long process that went through the carpentry department. I found it interesting how the buildings are laided out as the computing center is between the cooling tower and cryogenics. When they were upgrading the hvac systems the computing center looked like one big computer with huge manual fans at each entrance and we weren't allowed to move fans without the permission of the HVAC people. Also we'd always seem to know when power outages were going to happen ahead of time. I think SLAC uses more of California's power than anywhere else (some 1/16 or more) and they have the fastest interntet connection in the world, but at the desktop its a slow 10MB.
M
Feynman used to visit his sister in neighboring Palo Alto. He dropped by SLAC one day, "just to snoop around" and by chance, was shown a graph that no one quite knew what to make of. It was somewhat bell-shaped but the parameters that had gone into its construction were obscure - the only one who had a good handle on it was Bjorken and few were smart enough to understand what he was saying. Besides, he was just a grad student speaking in terms of current algebra, a language few understood at the time. The experimenters were hoping Feynman could explain the graph's significance.
Feynman looked at the curve, went back to his motel for the night and came back the next day thoroughly excited because he'd deciphered the curve. The curve was showing the momentum transfer that occurred when the electrons coming out of the accelerator slammed into the quarks at the atom's core. He described the point-like quarks as looking like slow moving pancakes due to the electron's relativistic speed.
That accidental encounter broke a mental logjam at SLAC and enabled them to get a handle on what their new machine was producing - evidence that the quark was real. Up until that point, most of them had been in Murray Gellman's thrall. Gellman had insisted that quarks were mathematical scaffolding that didn't have any physical counterparts. Feynman's insight at SLAC proved otherwise and gave the experimenters mental hooks that enabled them to figure out what was going on with their machine.
Feynman later said the Bjorken and he were saying the same thing - he had just chosen different words to express the idea.