Dick Taylor Story
Well, as an old-timer hired I remember meeting Dick Taylor for the first time in 1963, when SLAC operated out of an old warehouse on the
Stanford campus (some might recall the pleasant sound on its roof when it rained).
We soon learned that staff meetings were much more interesting whenever Dick Taylor was in the room. I heard him say that he likes to
"...keep peeling off the layers (of presented proposals) until I see t.h.e d.r.y r.o.t-..."
In 1963 he was already thinking about how to interlace the beams so that experimenters in end stations A,B, and C could "time share the
beam", in his words. He'd come in to nag us "math types" to start thinking about that problem...... saying things like ...
"yes, how do you
send K pulses/sec to each experimenter ...Yeah! Algebra! Divisibility of integers! ...for example, relatively prime numbers of pulses/sec
to each experimenter won't work ...Cmon work on on it...".
His job at the time was to design a spectrometer for End Station A, the place that eventually held his three spectrometers that famously
showed his 'Rasberry Jam' model of the proton.
I made a suggestion that he use our nascent TRANSPORT computer program to find the positions of the magnets of his spectrometer, since we
were already doing that for the beam line leading up to his end station A. He laughed and said something like: "Ha ha! - Not your problem!
Forget that computer mumbo-jumbo, it's laws of physics!"
Well, around two days later, he came into our office and slammed on my desk at least 20 pages completely full of lines of solid algebra,
all written in blue ink and said, "Ok, how do we get the computer to do it?" I sure wish I'd have kept those scribbles!
I'm betting that he conluded that both horizontal and vertical beam optics were required.
Here's another another story I heard third-hand that others may have also stated here. It's that he drove his classic dull grey Triumph-3
sportscar down the two-mile tunnel, (presumably before the waveguide was installed!), turned it around in the then-bare switchyard, and
then drove it back to the injector position and out onto Sand Hill road!
Sam Howry
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