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Cartoon: SLAC engineer takes it to the next level
:: 25 October, 2007
Lots of people doodle—a stick figure in the margins of a notepad or maybe a geometric design in the corner of a lab notebook—but SLAC engineer Jean-Charles Castagna takes it to the next level.
Castagna, who has been building instruments at SLAC for five years, has been cartooning all his life.
"I draw mostly stuff with people," Castagna says. "I see something that's funny and I draw."
His cartoons not only keep him smiling, they also provide memorable teaching tools. A French company used his cartoons for safety training. And when working part-time as a pastor, Castagna used cartoons to illustrate his message for parishioners.
"You can say it," he says, "But that's not going to be as powerful in meaning as a cartoon."
Born in France, Castagna trained as an engineer before spending two years doing missionary work in Africa. He returned to France with his future wife, an American missionary kid, and worked as an engineer.
But his third world experience had inspired him, and in his thirties, already a father of two, Castagna put his engineering career on hiatus to study the Bible at what is now Columbia International University in Columbia, South Carolina. He returned to France afterwards, because he felt he could help people there.
Castagna now has four children and currently lives in San Jose, where he and his wife run French Bible clubs and camps for kids.
In addition to drawing, Castagna paints with watercolors and enjoys photography. He likes to take close-ups and other unusual angles on everyday objects, "things that other people don't see," he says.
In figure, Jean-Charles Castagna with one of his cartoons.
Note for Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SLAC research program centers on experimental and theoretical research in elementary particle physics using electron beams and a broad program of research in atomic and solid state physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine using synchrotron radiation. The 3.2 kilometer (2.0 mile) long underground accelerator is the longest linear accelerator in the world, and is claimed to be "the world's straightest object." SLAC's meeting facilities provided a venue for the homebrew computer club and other pioneers of the 1980s home computer revolution, and later SLAC hosted the first webpage in the U.S. The above-ground klystron gallery atop the beamline is the longest building in the United States.
History
Founded in 1962, the facility is located on 1.72 square kilometer (426 acres) of Stanford University-owned land on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California—just west from the University's main campus. The main accelerator, a 3.2 kilometer long RF linear accelerator which can accelerate electrons and positrons up to 50 GeV, has been operational since 1966. It is buried 10 metres (30 feet) below ground and passes underneath Interstate 280. As of 2005, SLAC employs over 1,000 people, some 150 of which are physicists with doctorate degrees, and serves over 3,000 visiting researchers yearly, operating particle accelerators for high-energy physics and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) for synchrotron light radiation research.
Research at SLAC has produced three Nobel Prizes in Physics:
1976 - The Charm Quark — see J/Ψ particle[3]
1990 - Quark structure inside Protons and Neutrons
1995 - The tau lepton
Also, SSRL was "indispensable" in the research leading to the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
In the early-to-mid 90s, the Stanford Linear Collider or SLC, investigated the properties of the Z boson using the Stanford Large Detector.
Release link: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/
Tags: geometric design , notepad , SLAC engineer , Jean-Charles Castagna , pastor , France , missionary kid , International University in Columbia , San Jose. ,
