Something I saw yesterday.

Yesterday, I toured the Stanford Linear Accelerator facilities. We saw the 2 mile building that goes under 280. It's been around for a while and a lot of cutting edge research has been done there. There have been a few Nobels as a result of the amazing things that they can do there. We got a sneak peak at their new toy. The linear accelerator is being re-tooled to do even more cutting edge science. They've got a new x-ray gun that goes into use in a couple weeks. It just looks like a copper tube that goes a few hundred meters, but there's a lot of thought that goes into it. The temperature needs to be controlled. And to fire these electrons with any velocity everything needs to be perfectly straight. They even need to account for the curve of the earth.

The new x-ray potentially allows them to do all kinds of neat things. They should be able to take pictures of chemical reactions on a molecular level. Things like watching how a catalytic converter actually works, or the exact mechanisms of a drug binding to a protein.

We had some excellent guides who should all be physics professors. This is a $400 million dollar investment from DOE, but it's the most cutting edge stuff in the world by a good distance. And from what I can tell, it's money well spent.