Earthquake Jostles the New Stanford Linear Collider

On 12 October the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center announced its finding that Nature has only three families of elementary particles.’ (See PHYSICS TODAY, October, page 17) Five days later, as if in anger at having its secret revealed, Nature shook the offending instrument—the recently completed Stanford Linear Collider—by the throat. All things considered, the SLC has suffered relatively little damage from the historic earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay area at 5:04 pm on 17 October. Still, the small misalignments caused by the quake have interrupted the physics schedule of the collider for more than a month. As of this writing, the fond expectation at SLAC is for “a few more $Z°'$s by Christmas.”