Building a Laboratory

Establishing SLAC transcended construction of the accelerator complex, research facilities, and buildings: it meant creating a total environment that would enable great people to do successful work. This is obviously not the place to give again an account of the construction of the SLAC Laboratory. As noted previously, that has been done fully in the very comprehensive “Blue Book” that Richard Neal edited.1 I wrote some of the material in “The Blue Book’s” chapter on beam dynamics, as well as editing the rest of that chapter. I describe here only some of the general guiding principles for managing this new enterprise, principles that we employed to maximize the chance of success of the new laboratory. I also describe some of the activities in which I participated as a scientist, rather than as the director of the laboratory.