From above, the secret of SLAC is revealed. It is a huge guitar, strumming particles like waves…
I hitched a ride with a colleague to San Diego today and got to do most of the piloting between 2K and 26K ft. To air traffic control, this must have looked liked a damped spiral oscillation around the vector… as a novice pilot learns the feedback lag times. I also learned from communication with ATC at my midpoint drop-off, that I was a “package”.
Cool!!!
A guitar on the gound was spotted by the package in the air!
I now know something new. Interesting place.
I’ve driven that road many times, wondering what particles were being smashed as I drove over.
Clever title! I can imagine some Pink Floyd being played down below.
Front page of the Business Section of the San Francisco Chronicle. Congratulations!
Air Guitars at SLAC is certainly some type of "weird cross-pollination" 🙂
Nice shot Steve! It’s interesting to see how the landscape has changed with the LCLS construction.
Hope you don’t mind that I added a few notes. A virtual tour of sorts, courtesy of Flickr.
While I’m at it…
Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Particle Physics, and we’d love to have this added to the group!
Fantastic Josh – thanks!
agrinberg – thanks for the pointer. I’m glad that they took a fancy to my cousin’s photo with the heartfelt hands.
My tax dollars at work for something worthwhile! Operational in 2009…just around the corner!
In reference to your note about End Station III — the only reason I can imagine there would be a sign about not having animals is to keep away indiscriminate vandalism from animal rights activists.
While trying to shed light on this question, I did a Google search on "end station 3 stanford no animals" and the only relevant hit was on your photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/111733091/comment72057594...
where you said, "It’s an end station for the SLAC particle accelerator…." That’s not quite right. SLAC beams have never gone further from the end of the linac than the SLD collider hall shown in this photo. (Getting all the way to campus would require a couple more miles of tunnel and vacuum pipe!) I don’t know the exact history, but I think End Station 3 got its start (and name) as an experimental hall and beam dump for pre-SLAC linear accelerators built on campus in the 40s and 50s.
That makes perfect sense… but this all seems so very suspicious… I suspect a huge cover up. The truth is out there.
Here’s the background from that photo:
"Then there’s the incredibly bizarre "End Station 3" nestled underground in the engineering campus. It’s a strange building with no windows and peculiar, yet fetching, warning signs ("no animal experiments in this area"). After going underground a bit, you find yourself on a metal gang plank overlook looking down into a cavernous football-field-sized room with 5-ton cranes overhead, and little people below."
The site was very active, so if it was from an old accelerator, it certainly looked like it was still in use. A key point that I left out in the earlier description: there was a tunnel leading out of the bottom of the room – pointing in the direction of SLAC.
Coincidence?
This is about 5 stories underground, and heading out under the Roble dormitory (where I used to live). Imagine the student reaction to learn that they are riding shotgun on some hot particles! Goodness gracious, great balls of fire.
And hmmm, in the late 80’s, they shut down that dormitory to all visitors for a year while they pursued "earthquake retrofits". Probably a convenient way to upgrade the equipment below.
And then, in the year that the dorm re-opened, we have the big quake of ’89.
Coincidence?
I was bracing myself in a door frame in Roble during the quake. When I got back to my room, with eerie timing, the Mac pile on the floor booted up and the sound file of Sam Kinison’s voice screeched "You’re just happy I’m still alive!" (no joke)
Ok, that was probably just a coincidence.
But it makes you think.
Wow Steve…your brain never stops, does it?
A few more nuggets of information on the End Station III question:
Page 2 of this PDF file implies that it wasn’t built till 1972: http://www.stanford.edu/group/hepl/HEPL_History_opt.pdf
So I guess I’m wrong about it being used as an end station for the HEPL accelerators of the 50s. Notice that most of the rest of HEPL dates to1948. (By the way, End Station III still exists as home to various experiments, but the rest of HEPL was recently demolished and is now a giant hole/construction site.) I don’t know what accelerator work was being done there in the 70s — there are some references to experimental cancer treatment in those slides, but the exact locations are not given.
More interesting is this diagram, showing side and top views of part of End Station III.
I found this in a 2002 PhD thesis of a student on the CDMS experiment. CDMS has now been moved to Soudan Mine in Minnesota (to get more shielding from cosmic ray background), but was originally in a tunnel in End Station III.
A view from a helicopter I took a few years ago.
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/upshift/3241575015/]
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