Farewell to SLAC (?)
Many, many years ago, when I was applying to colleges in the US one thing I knew was that I really wanted to study Physics, and hence I mostly applied to places with really strong Physics departments. At the time I was living in Rhode Island as an exchange student in high school, and was able to visit several of these really good research institutions on the East Coast. The only place that was not on the East Coast that I applied to was Stanford, and at the time there was not much of a chance of me visiting it. So when I got accepted there I was a bit unprepared and did not know much about the place. In fact, the only two things that I knew for sure were that it was in California and that it had SLAC, a world renowned high energy Physics laboratory where many of the discoveries relating to our understanding of the subatomic Physics have been made over the span of several decades.
Once I got to Stanford, however, I realized that SLAC is some distance away from the main campus. I quickly got overwhelmed with school work and other activities that kept me very busy throughout my undergraduate years, so it took me almost four years before I made the first real visit to SLAC. By then some of the youthful naiveté about Physics labs had faded away, and I did not have as much of unalloyed reverence for it. Most of the main big research and discoveries had been done by then, and the laboratory was trying to reinvent itself and to branch out into other areas of experimental Physics. Nonetheless, as a symbol of big science and exciting new discoveries in particle physics SLAC would definitely always be on my mind.
So in the light of all of that it came as a big shock to me and many others when it was recently announced that SLAC will be getting a new name. The reason is that SLAC was always technically owned by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and those guys recently went on a rampage with patenting all the names of the national labs. Since "S" in SLAC stands for Stanford, and Stanford doesn't like having its name used by someone else, this created a bit of a riff between the two parties, so now the change of the name seems inevitable. Which is rather unfortunate – it was the name that the laboratory was known for during its golden years, and had put Stanford on the map of high energy Physics. The change of name may hinder Stanford's ability to get its name across to prospective Physics majors from faraway places.