AGS Celebrates Twentieth Anniversary

Brookhaven celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron in May. John Blewett, Ernest Courant (Brookhaven) and Kjell Johnsen (CERN) reminisced about designing and building the machine. Some of the speakers recalled the great physics discoveries made at the AGS. Melvin Schwartz (Stanford) talked about finding the muon neutrino and a “residual level of junk” events that were probably neutral currents. Val Fitch described the discovery of CP violation (an experiment approved on the basis of a two‐page proposal with no detailed background calculations). Nicholas Samios (Brookhaven) reviewed the bubble‐chamber program, which over the two decades yielded 40 million pictures, including the first Ω and the first charmed baryon. Samuel Ting (MIT) described the experiments leading to the $J/ψ,$ which led to a new high‐energy era with charm, beauty and other gracious qualities.