After weeks of putting it off, I finally went to the Redwood City Library and picked up my library card. It’s been ready for several weeks, but I just wasn’t making the time for it. However, I am certainly glad I did get it, because it led me to a storehouse of great books.
Being a devout scientist, the first thiing I did was hit the physics section. It was a goldmine of both textbooks (Misner et al’s “Gravitation”, for example) and popular books. The find that Jodi made, however, was priceless – to me, at least. She produced from a shelf the two-inch-thick volume “The Stanford Two-Mile Accelerator”, edited by R. B. Neal. This book, finished just after the successful turn on of SLAC, details the history of the project, the accelerator physics and engineering, and the details of every aspect of that then world’s most luminous electron accelerator.
What I find particularly spelllbinding about the book is the historical context. While the idea of quarks was clearly around, SLAC had not yet completed the work which would lay the groundwork for the proof of the quark hypothesis. It’s amazing to read that sense of hope and expectation, that experiments yet to be conducted at SLAC might explain the particle zoo known in the 50’s and 60’s.
All right, I’m getting back to my book!
