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I hid inside a 65-ton cyclotron magnet my grandfather built, and read nuclear physics until dark

A piece of his grandfather's work, used as a reading room

About this entry

This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.

Concept

What this is

The particle accelerator E. O. Lawrence invented at Berkeley, and which William L. Whitson helped build. A 65-ton electromagnet salvaged from the original sat outside the Lawrence Hall of Science.

It is in this record for a reason that has nothing to do with physics. An eight-year-old could climb inside it and vanish.

The record

Where this intersects the work

Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.

The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.

1970s

Where the capacity for solitude came from

He rode the Humphrey Go BART van up to the Lawrence Hall of Science while his mother worked on campus, climbed into the magnet, and stayed hidden until the sun went down, reading nuclear physics, chemistry and astronomy.

Jonathan Hare's own framing: it is where he learned to hold a thought in superposition for hours at a time, alone and undisturbed. Whatever else this record contains, that habit is upstream of most of it.

Hare's accountAuthor's account — source record S-025
The graph

Connected from here

There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.

Provenance

Where this came from

Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.

The architecture

What this bears on

This record is not biography attached to a technical claim. Each runs into the other: the experiences below produced the mechanisms, and the mechanisms are what those experiences turned out to require.

How it actually works

Into the explainers

This page is the anecdote — the thing that draws you in. The explainers are where the mechanism is set out in full, with the problem it solves and the condition on which it fails.

Claim your edge

What is missing, and how to fix it

This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.

If you were there

Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.

Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.

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Where this leads

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