The school buses weren't yellow, but the field trip was an atom-smashing success and the students got to ask the scientists a lot of questions.
Q: "What are those blue and yellow things?"
A: "Focusing and bending magnets."
Q: "How vulnerable are you to electric-power problems?
A: "Very."
Many of the Faculty Senate members who trooped around the grounds of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in January were getting their first-ever look at the facility on the hill, and slac director Jonathan Dorfan did his best to make the walkabout instructive by outlining the purposes of the main facilities.
In a get-acquainted presentation that approached the speed of light, Dorfan described the world's highest-energy linear accelerator as "essentially a very large and powerful electron microscope that is used to see what's inside protons." What he and his colleagues are looking for are the fundamental building blocks called quarks. The more energy generated by accelerated electrons, the tinier the things scientists can see, which helps to explain why slac researchers have discovered three of the world's six known quarks.
Moving on to the second major facility, Dorfan explained that the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory provides very intense, energetic Xrays that are used in chemical, environmental science and structural molecular biology projects. "Electrons going around in a circle are very unhappy," he noted. "And they show their unhappiness by emitting hard Xrays."
Their introduction to high-energy physics completed, the faculty got back on the buses for the drive through research yards and past hulking concrete buildings to the synchrotron lab. In one office, U.S. Geological Survey researchers are studying arsenic-contaminated drinking water from Bangladesh.
There, too, President John Hennessy, provost John Etchemendy and a few dozen of their closest friends crowded into a tiny room where steam was spitting from a liquid-nitrogen canister on a gigantic praying mantis of a machine. Slipping on nifty 3-D glasses, they stared at a shimmering computer model of the crystal structure of a protein that researchers are studying in an effort to figure out how aggressive viruses invade cells. "Wow," said a professor of drama, rendered almost speechless by the dancing image.
Faculty from earth sciences, linguistics, psychology and philosophy then donned red hard hats to tour the $177 million particle accelerator known as the B Factory -- for the B-mesons, or subatomic mixtures of matter and antimatter, that are stirred up inside it. There physicists are chasing after the mystery of why matter exists. Faculty also got a quick glimpse of BaBar, the 1,200-ton, $110 million particle detector that is named for . . . what? The children's book elephant?
Q: "Why is it called BaBar?"
A: "Purely whimsical."
