Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by FrankenPC 3863 days ago
Side note: My dad (RIP. Princeton PhD high energy physics working at UCSD as a professor/researcher.) lived in the high energy realm for decades. He worked on every major particle accelerator known and some unknown.

True story. He had a hobby going in a public storage unit with a surplus military linear accelerator. Smallish. About 30 feet long. Of course it required huge amounts of power so he cut a hole in the unit and ran a line to the nearest pole and siphoned 480 mains volts. And the gamma radiation was very dangerous so he hauled in several tons of lead destined for EPA long term sequestering. We worked one summer building shielding walls and measuring the operational radiation. After the unit was 'safely' running, we would take various pieces of thrown away Lucite from the physics machine shop and turn them into polished beam trees (Google it). We then gave them away for Christmas gifts. What fun for a 10 year old kid!
1 comments
jacquesm 3863 days ago
That's a lovely story.
link
FrankenPC 3863 days ago
Thanks. An addendum to his life: Apparently my dad led an early experiment at Fermi lab that discovered scaling violations which led to QCD. It was a while until it was officially confirmed and published. He also worked with a physicist named Masek at a Stanford SPEAR experiment which discovered a new quark/anti-quark. Neither got recognition which is how the good old boys network functions in basic research.
link
jacquesm 3863 days ago
You should really do some digging and do a proper write up, it would make one hell of a story and I'm sure your dad would approve. So many people working hard without any recognition but that's no reason not to illuminate that a bit.
link
FrankenPC 3862 days ago
He's gone. And I only have the anecdotal info from colleagues he worked with. MANY scientists are swept under the carpet due to the recognition power play that occurs at the high institutional echelons. I can't prove that either. My dad was a modest man and never extolled his past successes. So, I'll never really know.
link
mdturnerphys 3863 days ago
Looked up Masek. According to his obituary in Physics Today [1], his team at SPEAR "discovered new bound states of a charm and anti-charm quark." Important work, but not a new quark/anti-quark.

[1] http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/n...

link