Drive south from San Francisco on Interstate 280 and you'll cross over something genuinely strange: a two-mile-long building, perfectly straight, that for decades held the record as the longest building in the United States. Beneath it runs a tunnel where electrons are flung to within a whisker of the speed of light. Above it sits the klystron gallery — a corridor of high-powered vacuum tubes that pump microwave energy into the beamline below, like a 3.2-kilometer pipe organ playing to subatomic particles.

This is SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and its history is studded with Nobel Prizes. Three of them, in fact, came directly from work done inside that beam pipe. In 1976, Burton Richter co-discovered the J/ψ particle at SLAC's SPEAR ring — independently and simultaneously with a team at Brookhaven — which confirmed the existence of the charm quark. Richard Taylor shared the 1990 prize for proving that protons aren't fundamental: they're made of quarks, which SLAC saw by firing electrons at them and watching how they bounced, in a beautiful echo of Rutherford's gold-foil experiment from 70 years earlier. Martin Perl won in 1995 for discovering the tau lepton, the heavy cousin of the electron.

But the klystrons are the unsung hero of the whole place. A klystron is a vacuum tube invented by the Varian brothers at Stanford in 1937 — the very same family Ansel Adams photographed sand dunes for in memoriam. It works by bunching up a beam of electrons with a microwave signal, then extracting amplified power as those bunches drift past resonant cavities. SLAC has rows upon rows of them, each one a refrigerator-sized device kicking out tens of megawatts of pulsed microwave power. Without klystrons, the linear accelerator simply doesn't accelerate.

And here's where things get delightfully unexpected:

• SLAC ran one of the first websites outside Europe — Stanford physicists picked up Tim Berners-Lee's idea in 1991 specifically to share particle physics preprints. The web's killer app was, briefly, quarks.
• The site now hosts the Linac Coherent Light Source, an X-ray free-electron laser that produces flashes a billion times brighter than any prior X-ray source, used to film chemical reactions in progress and image individual viruses.
• The original two-mile linac is so straight that engineers had to account for the curvature of the Earth when designing it.

The same klystron technology that powers SLAC also sits inside every radar dish that guided WWII bombers, every satellite ground station, and — in a smaller cousin form called the magnetron — the microwave oven in your kitchen. The line from "warming up leftover pizza" to "discovering the substructure of matter" is, remarkably, a fairly short one. Both rely on the same trick: take a beam of electrons, give it a gentle shove at just the right frequency, and harvest a tidal wave of microwave power.