Lab Experience at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center – Humanitas – Lorenzo Profeta

My second lab rotation at the Stanford Synchrotron, SLAC, was incredibly fascinating and immersive. The synchrotron is an environment imbued with scientific allure, perhaps due to the level of security required to access the facility, perhaps because of the magenta light that flashes when the beam is active, perhaps because research is conducted continuously, especially during the night, or perhaps because the massive architecture contrasts with its purpose of accommodating and manipulating infinitesimally small particles. Walking through the metallic corridors of the synchrotron, one sometimes remembers that just a few meters away, within a dark and silent tunnel, electrons are traveling at nearly the speed of light. And one becomes pensive: that awareness has the flavor of a cosmic revelation, like when you look at the sky on a particularly starry night and feel small and transient within the matter that takes our form.

One wonders if our ancestors, observing the light from those stars, could have imagined, perhaps guided by their intangible spirituality, that our species would one day be able to accelerate invisible particles to the same speed as the light emitted from those stars. Would they have thought that we have transformed ourselves into a divine entity?

And then, why magenta? Among all the colors that could signal ongoing radiation (which I have always personally associated with yellow), why choose magenta? I asked myself this question many times when, at night, on my way to the lab, I passed by the light indicating that the synchrotron was in operation. I later discovered that magenta is the only color not found in the light spectrum; it is a color invented by our mind to represent the two extremes (red and violet) together. Normally, if we mix two colors, we see the color halfway between them on the spectrum; in the case of red and violet, this should generate green. However, our mind feels the need to create meaning from what it sees, and green does not appear to be the right fusion of red and violet, so it creates a new, entirely imaginary color to link the two extremes and close the circle.

In physical reality, the spectrum is a line that does not close; in our minds, it does. Is it perhaps a kind of scientific sarcasm to choose, to represent an invisible beam made of particles traveling at the speed of light, a color that exists only in our minds and not in reality? Did the visionary scientists who built SLAC want to suggest that there is more within ourselves than just measurable matter? Or that science and physics can lead us to illuminate that unknown?