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Saturday, August 16, 2014

New director at SLAC

I am hearing rumors that Mike Dunne (former head of Laser Fusion Energy in NIF and leading the LIFE program) has been selected to be the new director of LCLS at SLAC. Does anyone know more?

25 comments:

Anonymous said...

And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it Riding the Gravy Train.

What, no high-foot LIFE program?

Anonymous said...

Would be good if true. Moses screwed him like everyone else, though he's smart enough to have known better.

Anonymous said...

Hey Mike -

Got any openings? How about posting the address we should apply to?

Anonymous said...

Seems several people have gone there.

Anonymous said...

SLAC... never heard of it. Must be for losers.

Anonymous said...


What is SLAC and why should LLNL pay for it?

Anonymous said...



Is SLAC paid with overhead dollars? Where is the value added? Has someone looked into this?

Anonymous said...

Isn't SLAC the long lost tribe of LLNL that moved to Palo Alto?

Anonymous said...

I hear that it's a secret site where they do classified experiments with lujan. (Don't tell the neighbors)

Anonymous said...


Who is paying for SLAC and why are they paying for it? What is done at SLAC that is so valuable? If there was real value to such a thing that the private market would pay for it. What kind of people work at SLAC?

Anonymous said...

I'll assume that you are actually asking a question...

SLAC is mostly funded by Office of Science. SLAC performs a wide variety of projects these days, wich tend to focus around basic research. They are still involved in High Energy Physics. They run one of the new space telescope projects. They also do quite a lot of basic materials research using various exotic "light sources". One of these, the Linac Coherent Light Source, uses the old "2-mile accelerator" to produce short pulsed, extremely high brightness x-rays which are used to probe materials for the basic atomic and molecular mechanisms for important processes. This is useful for a wide variety of studies, including solar energy, designing new catalysts, biosciences, medicine, etc, etc, etc. Some of this is paid for by actual "paying customers" like pharmaceutical companies.

Office of Science pays for these studies because it's their mission to advance, and because these are things that may someday be important to all us.

The people who work at SLAC are pretty similar to those who work at LLNL. They're a little less public-service oriented, and a little more science-geeky (in my experience). They are also less "disciplined" and a little more informal, because they are not as tightly regimented as LLNL is (by DOE).

Anonymous said...

The people who work at SLAC are pretty similar to those who work at LLNL.

That's not what I hear. I hear SLAC are the smarties, LBNL are next smarties, and then LLNL.

Anonymous said...

I'm not smart enough to tell the difference.

Anonymous said...

Three point sources of prima-donna rays within a few miles of each other! Isn't California lucky?

Anonymous said...

Triangulation, mate, Triangulation.

Anonymous said...

"Office of Science pays for these studies because it's their mission to advance, and because these are things that may someday be important to all us.

The people who work at SLAC are pretty similar to those who work at LLNL. They're a little less public-service oriented, and a little more science-geeky (in my experience). They are also less "disciplined" and a little more informal, because they are not as tightly regimented as LLNL is (by DOE)."

"May be important for us?" What you mean by you us Mr scientist? LLNL is bad enough but why on heavens good green earth, sun, solar systems, galaxy, local group should the US taxpayer be billed for more geeks to play in sandboxes? Wow just wow! At the very least why is SLAC not run by a LLC like LLNL, at least there would be some non-government corporate control that would drastically reduce the waste and provide for real accountability. Government funding for science is not the solution to our problems; government funding for science is the problem.

Anonymous said...

Panovsky was a hell of a guy. Drell ad well. Both strong friends of science.

Don't fret though, commuting from the Livermore Valley to Page Mill is suicide, and affordable housing isn't within 100 megaton blast radius of SLAC,

Anonymous said...

August 22, 2014 at 10:41 PM

And ignorance is bliss

Anonymous said...

There is an angry Ayn Rand nutzo among us.

Anonymous said...

Only one?

Anonymous said...

Something wrong with Ayn Rand?

Anonymous said...

"Something wrong with Ayn Rand?

August 26, 2014 at 11:09 AM"

Ever read Ayn Rand?

Anonymous said...

You read Ayn Rand. You read this blog. You think negatively of Ayn Rand?

Wow.

Anonymous said...

Anyone who's dated an Eastern Euro could tell you that Ayn had more hair on her chest than the average Nat Lab scientist.

Anonymous said...

Turns out rumors were true, but it took a while to make the announcement

https://news.slac.stanford.edu/announcement/all-employee-memo-lcls-director-announcement

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