
Remastered 1964 films show origins of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center - sohkamyung
https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2019-01-16-remastered-films-show-slac-origins.aspx
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limbicsystem
Can confirm - the tour of SLAC is (or was in the early 2000s) a great
experience. Apart from the squirrels sitting on the klystrons, I remember a
lot of great engineering and 'forward planning': For example, highway 280 was
not built when they started construction - but they knew it was coming so they
pre-built that bridge that runs 280 over the beamline so that future highway
work would not interfere so much with their operations. And they had only just
invented lasers - they knew that by the time they had finished construction
they would be able use this new invention to align the tubes but they weren't
quite there yet with the laser physics so they just left an empty laser
calibration tube ready for when someone (machinists?) had completed that part
of the engineering (hopefully!). Also I was impressed that their measurement
precision is such that they can detect and compensate for the movement of the
continental plate associated with the Pacific tides.

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batbomb
I've been passing "Fabrication of the Accelerator Structure" (the un-
remastered version) around to people the last several years to show some
people where I work.

Andy recently remastered these. I hadn't seen the first one before, but the
second one is 100% work 42 minutes of your time. The narration is great, the
topic is great, the pictures are great. Unlike current videos, it's happy to
dwell on shots for more than 2 seconds, in silence, while people are actually
working - instead of the pretend-working for a camera shot with dialog or
futuristic music to fill the silence.

I really wish they'd have created more of these types of videos over the
years, but $84k in today's dollars for a video would be a lot of EPO budget
these days, in addition to 42 minutes being an eternity. It's a great
documentary, and, I think, a treasure.

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eslaught
Shameless plug: we're starting a new computer science research group at SLAC
and hiring for full time staff scientist positions.

You might think a CS research group is a little odd at a linear accelerator
center, but one of the things we learned when the forefront of particle
physics moved to the LHC is that we have to diversify. So SLAC's mission is a
lot more broad now than it was at the time. Also, I'd make the observation
that there are a lot of problems in programming languages, compilers, OSes,
etc. that are a lot less solved than you might think, and because a relatively
small fraction of the CS community is paying attention to scientific computing
there are a lot of areas that are surprisingly underdeveloped compared to the
relatively well beaten path of commercial computing.

Contact info in profile if interested.

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pryelluw
Scientific computing is still frequently populated with half baked apps or
outdated apps. There is a big amount of progress to be made here and the
problems are not boring at all.

I've developed programs for:

Gathering and analyzing climate data at scale

Sample collection robotics

Low power data logging

SDR

and many more.

The really cool thing is that you dont need a phd in CS to be effective and
enable other scientists success.

One question for you, eslaught:

Do you have any specific requirements that would immediately disqualify a
candidate?

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eslaught
> [...] to be effective and enable other scientists success.

I would reframe this slightly: What are the fundamental open problems in
computer science that prevent our existing tools from working for scientists
more generally? E.g. are there constraints (like the need for high performance
in certain applications) that break assumptions or tradeoffs made elsewhere in
CS? Personally, I believe there are such constraints, and that's why
techniques which may work for CS in other application areas don't always work
so well in scientific computing---and conversely why some of the historical
solutions in scientific computing look so backwards to the rest of the CS
community.

For us, it's not just about helping one particular group of scientists
(though, obviously our work is heavily informed by working closely with
scientists at the lab), it's about bringing about a sea change in the way
science is done, by improving the tools we use it do it (be those programming
languages, compilers, libraries, frameworks, visualization techniques, AI/ML,
or whatever).

> Do you have any specific requirements that would immediately disqualify a
> candidate?

We're new enough that I'm not sure we've got a crisp answer to this, but if
you mail me I can ask around if there are specific points you have concerns
about.

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pontifier
I met a man by the name of Gerard Collet who worked at SLAC as head machinist
for many years. He told me that much of the design of these things was done by
the machinists in partnership with the scientists. The scientists would
describe some impossibly precise thing and there would be many back and forth
brainstorming sessions in which a plan would gradually emerge for something
that met the requirements, and could actually be built.

He had agreed to advise me on construction of my fusion reactor prototype, but
that was several years ago, and I was unable to obtain funds to proceed.

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twic
A fine case of nominative determinism:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collet)

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Beat me to it :-)

I love stuff like that. I went to nautical school with a girl whose first name
was Dory and a guy whose last name was Schiff.

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Kaibeezy
When our kid was 2, we used to drive over SLAC on 280 several times a week. We
taught him to be able to answer what “the building that looks like a train” is
really called. What’s cuter than a little guy squeaking “Stanford Linear
Accelerator” :) Still makes us smile.

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walrus1066
Must have been really exciting time to be particle physicist in those days.
SLAC & other colliders enabled a revolution in physics, culminating in the
formulation & verification of the standard model - a truly unparalleled feat
of scientific progress.

[https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/november-2014/the-n...](https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/november-2014/the-
november-revolution)

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kqr2
For those in the area, SLAC also offers public tours:

[https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/public-
tours](https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/public-tours)

~~~
saagarjha
Those who are in the local Science Bowl region get a tour too!

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dekhn
I was lucky enough in grad school to use SLAC's beamline for diffraction
studies of some muscle protein (just a rotation project). You get a little
hutch that has a little port to the beam and can open/close it to expose your
sample. The interlocks were really impressive (don't want people to be exposed
to the beam).

The whole facility is really a holy temple of science (hushed tones,
historical scientific relics in glass cases, etc) and a pinnacle of
engineering.

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jackfoxy
Construction of SLAC was a big deal on the peninsula at the time. At least I
was fully aware of it. I remember touring SLAC in 1968 or 69 with my
elementary school class. We had no idea what it was doing beyond it being an
_atom smasher_.

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chungy
The site seems to be inaccessible over IPv6. It resolves an address but never
responds. I had to load it in Tor Browser in order to actually get to the
content.

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renholder
Stupid question: Is there a way to "offsite archive" these?

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stevenwoo
youtube-dl is a popular package in homebrew for Macs or for linux. It's a
command line tool you can use from terminal like:

youtube-dl
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I4GxICAcBs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I4GxICAcBs)

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JohnJamesRambo
I can't wait to watch these tonight!

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a_imho
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

