In addition to serving as director of a major Department of Energy laboratory, he also became known in his later years for other contributions to academic and public life.
In 1967, 400 enthusiastic scientists met at Argonne National Laboratory to discuss plans to build a new 200 GeV accelerator and a national laboratory to house it.
With a blue marker poised at a large white flip chart, Maury Tigner, a physicist at Cornell University, turned to a group of about 10 representatives from industry and asked, “What kind of applications interest your company?” The room was cramped and beige, a generic hotel meeting spa
When objects weighing thousands of pounds have to be moved, the call goes out to riggers— specialized teams that work with hoists and cranes. They’re required to wear proper safety gear; and at some point, the riggers at SLAC decided to make a statement with their helmets.
It began with a guest speaker in her small upstate New York town. Roshan Houshmand’s uncles were visiting, and because of their engineering background, she thought a talk on physics would be ideal for a night of entertainment.
The problem: How to get short-lived radioactive drugs from the nuclear physics lab that makes them to a hospital 2.5 kilometers away, on the far side of a busy campus, in two minutes flat.