Stanford University's linear accelerator, for which President Eisenhower is asking Congress to appropriate $100 million (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), will be the most spectacular addition yet to the growing array of instruments science has devised to probe the atom.
It is the most powerful atom smasher now scheduled, and certainly the biggest. To build it, engineers will drive a tunnel two miles through the solid rock of a minor mountain near Palo Alto. This rocky housing will keep its radiation from frying innocent bystanders. At the accelerator's business end will be a complex knot of laboratory buildings stuffed with futuristic apparatus.
The most familiar...
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