Jul 24, 2008

SLAC-ING OFF

Stanford, energy department, fight over name of atom-smasher

By Lisa M. Krieger / Bay Area News Group

For years, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center - SLAC to its friends - has been a reserved and orderly universe.

Then the federal government decided it wanted to trademark the name, and things exploded.

Stanford University objected, laying claim to its own name. Then the feds proposed an entirely new name. The impasse has triggered unprecedented protest in the once-serene lab. Saying it tampers with tradition - and defies common sense - SLAC physicists are circulating their first protest petition in decades.

"When Wolfgang Panofsky set up this lab, the link to Stanford was crucial," Professor Marty Breidenbach said. "This would break that link."

Precise and pragmatic folks with careers based on fact-building, they see no reason to recklessly toss out an internationally renowned name linked to four Nobel Prizes.

The dispute started when the federal government's Department of Energy, which leases the lab, decided it wanted to trademark the names of its 17 labs That's because a new law allows trademark suits against the government.

Stanford's response: No way, no how.

The name "Stanford" belongs to Leland and his university (and a local beauty salon, coin wash and driving school). Not Washington, D.C.

The Energy Department offered up another rationale: "Linear Accelerator Center" doesn't describe the full range of SLAC's activities. A new name, they said, would reflect the lab's shift into fields like photon science and particle astrophysics.

Nonsense, respond the physicists. The center's new flagship instrument, the Linac Coherent Light Source, is profoundly dependent on the linear accelerator.

"Keeping 'Stanford' in the name is crucial for maintaining this laboratory's high quality and expertise," according to the petition, because it helps recruit top staff.

Nobelist and former SLAC Director Burton Richter calls the impasse "an example of DOE idiocy."

In a recent letter to employees, SLAC Director Persis Drell asked the scientists to suggest new names.

One wag suggests "Fundamental-Understanding-of-Nature Discovery Machines - or FUNDMe. Another proposed "IAMSOMAD" (Institute of American Master's Students Operations in Maniacal Accelerations Development).

But there is one group on campus that will celebrate a name change: the Stanford Labor Action Coalition, a student activist group that has shared SLAC's acronym since 1998.

No longer will the public confuse the SLAC holding a minimum-wage protest with the SLAC probing the origins of the universe.

"Although," noted one anonymous physicist, "given the caliber of the university's campus workers and the state of science funding, you really never know."