Category: SMU SPS Trip to SLAC/Silicon Valley

(Photos from day four)

Our last full day of the trip began with a drive up the peninsula’s scenic highway, 280, to highway 1, and then just shy of the Golden Gate Bridge. Construction routed us away from the usual exit and instead up a scenic road overlooking the Pacific and the mouth of the Golden Gate. Eventually, we wound our way through SF city streets to the Exploratorium, a massive building next to the Palace of Fine Arts.

Unknown to us before we arrived, an awards dinner was being hosted there that night. About half the exhibits were closed off, along with the cafe. We got half-price admission as a result, and spent the next 1.5 hours playing with infrared cameras, soap bubbles, ore-rich sand and magnets, vortices, optical tricks, sound demonstrations, and my favorite: the cloud chamber.

We left as the Exploratorium was closing and headed over to Fisherman’s Wharf. After some initial exploring as a group, we broke into two smaller groups: one for Ghiradelli Square and the other for a walk out to a pier for photos of the city. When we regrouped at 5, we headed into one of the wharf’s many seafood restaurants for the final dinner of the trip. Over crab and shrimp and scallops, we traded stories and talked about all the things to come this summer.

We closed the day just an hour before sunset by parking at the Golden Gate Bridge and walking the whole 1.7 miles across, then the same back. The air was cool and windy, the traffic heavy over the bridge, and the city glowing like embers in the last rays of the setting sun. Building windows across the bay, in the Oakland hills, blazed like beacons in the sunset. We finally all arrived back at our van and headed back to the hotel.

We are all extremely grateful for Mr. Lightner’s support for this unique trip: a chance for the SPS students to experience a unique cradle of science and technology and all the environs that make people want to live here. Today, we concentrate on getting home.

(Photos from day two)

The last two days were extremely busy. Tuesday began with breakfast at Izzy’s Bagels again (by popular demand), and then we took some rest before piling into the van and heading to a few stops. The first was Eric’s Gourmet, a great little sandwich shop right near SLAC and a SLAC staple for many years. We then fueled up at the SLAC gift shop on tee shirts, mugs, and umbrellas – something we had forgotten to do on Monday while we were at SLAC. SLAC is conveniently located by the highway that takes us due south, then east, to Mt. Hamilton.

The road up to the top of Mt. Hamilton was long and winding. Twenty miles of nauseating twists and turns, with sheer drops and no guard rails, awaited us. We chugged slowly up the mountain, finally arriving at the observatory. After a subdued lunch in the cool, foggy air, we headed into the main building for a short tour. The tour treated us to a view of the large reflecting telescope in the main observatory building. While old, the telescope is still used about twice a week, depending on atmospheric conditions. The entire floor surrounding the telescope tower can raise and lower to allow for optimal viewing, the massive telescope is so well-balanced that a single observer can move it by hand using a large handle near the eyepiece.

Following that, we walked the half-mile to the 120-inch reflecting telescope, up a winding mountain road. By then, we were pretty tired, and sat in the dark outside the telescope half-napping to informational videos about the telescope. We concluded our visit to Lick with a walk past a few of the other 10 telescopes on the mountain, heading back to the van and our decent down the mountain. We closed that day with dinner at a noodle house in San Jose.

(Photos from day three)

The third day began with breakfast at one of my own favorite eateries – Stacks, a pancake house in Menlo Park. We were joined by a few colleagues, including our SLAC tour guide.

After breakfast, we headed over to the Bay trails near NASA Ames, to get in a walk and take in the site of the NASA Ames Research Center in the distance. We walked through salt marshland, the Bay to our northeast and the sprawling hangars and wind tunnels of NASA Ames to our southwest. Tired, hungry, and (for some) suffering allergies from all the plants near the trail, we headed into downtown Mountain View for lunch at Sono Sushi. We broke into small groups after that and browsed the small shops along Castro St. in Mt. View, including a vast used book store and a coffee shop.

This killed enough time that we were ready to head to Google for a private tour by a physics colleague of mine who now works at Google. He not only took us around the campus, he arranged a small forum with himself and another trained physicist who also works at Google. They fielded questions, asked about the students’ interests and experience, and gave us some amazing insight into the research philosophy of this important information company. We learned about 20% projects, which employees are encouraged to pursue out of interest in addition to their main projects. We learned about TGIF, a weekly Friday briefing on that week’s accomplishments in the company held in the main cafeteria. We saw the flexible cubicle spaces, the tent-like meeting rooms that look temporary but which are actually fixed parts of the work landscape. We learned about distraction, how to achieve it, and how not to fall prey to it. My own view of what Google is, and how it functions, was radically changed by this experience.

We met for breakfast at Izzy’s Brooklyn Bagels at 10am, and fueled up for our first day here in the Bay  Area. After a short walk back to the hotel, we piled in the giant van we’ve rented for this trip and, in the cold drizzling rain, took a short driving tour of Stanford University before heading to SLAC. We arrived at SLAC just in time to grab a bunch of tables in the cafeteria and hold them until some friends and colleagues arrived to eat lunch with us. Post-docs from SLAC and the University of Maryland, as well as our Stanford grad student tour guide, Nicole, mixed it up with the students and answered their questions about physics, experiments, and life in science. Just behind us, at one of the tables, sat one of SLAC’s own three Nobel Prize winners, eating lunch with his own friends and colleagues.

Our tour began at 1pm with a short overview of the laboratory. Nicole delivered this  presentation from the SLAC Director’s  conference room. We then piled into the van again and headed into the accelerator area. Our tour started at the Klystron Gallery, one-quarter of the way along the two-mile linear accelerator that is the heart of SLAC science. The buzzing microwave generators, the klystrons, were busy feeding energy into the accelerator (25 feet below us) for use in the Linac Coherent Light Source. We stood in the gallery hallway, stared off into infinity (OK, well, to the vanishing point of the human eye), and then piled back in the van.

(for more photos, visit http://snappy.cooleysekula.net/thumbnails.php?album=10)

We saw the Main Control Center, the heart of accelerator operations at SLAC, and then took a short walk down a dark, cramped tunnel to the Research Yard. It was here that, in the 1960s and 1970s, the experiments were done that demonstrated that protons have substructure. This substructure came to be interpreted using the “quark hypothesis,” long unfavored as an explanation of proton and hadron structure until mountains of evidence appeared in support of it. We paused on the steel walkway, two stories above the ground, and looked out over the yard at the massive concrete end stations A and B, as well as the new extension of the linear accelerator that serves the light-source community at the laboratory.

We next stopped at the Stanford Large Detector (SLD), which ceased operations in the late 1990s around the time BaBar was completed and began operations. Donning hardhats, we were shown parts of the detector before descending into the detector pit for a quick photograph. We wrapped up the tour in the BaBar detector hall, where the experiment stood largely disassembled; only 2/3 of the barrel and back endcap remain, and the tracking system has been gutted from the detector. It’s the first time I’ve watched an experiment important in my own career be taken apart and shipped away. It was a deeply meaningful, and slightly painful, moment. I was happy, however, to pose in front of BaBar with my two undergraduate researchers, Landon and Matthew, who have done their projects on data from the BaBar Experiment.

We wrapped the day with coffee and rest in the Kavli Astroparticle Institute, before heading off for a nice casual dinner at In & Out Burger, a staple of California fast food. It was a nice counterpoint to the spicy and exotic Thai food we feasted on last night.

Tomorrow, we head to the top of Mount Hamilton to see the Lick Observatory. Among its many studies, it was the site of the first U.S. test of General Relativity, and should afford spectacular views of the entire Bay Area.