Sir

In the News profile on B-factories, my statements and those of others at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) were distorted ( Nature 403, 586; 2000). It is damaging to the relationship between our laboratory and the Japanese KEK B-factory, and to me personally, to have my words made to appear competitive and inflammatory when that was not my intention.

Accelerators are complex machines that cannot be expected to operate perfectly as soon as they are turned on — reaching design performance is a process of gradual improvement.

I did say to your reporter that SLAC's machine worked very well in its first months and that everyone was surprised and pleased at how the performance had improved so quickly. I doubt that I used the word “debugging” with reference to this process.

I did not tell your reporter that there was any indication of whether the US or the Japanese experiment was ahead. I do not believe that it is possible to know this at the moment. Both projects have shown significant successes and both need much more work before the important physics results can be obtained.

One point not made in your article is the value of having two projects working on this same physics.

It is not true that only the first measurement will matter. In science, replicability of results is essential, and as a theoretical physicist I will be much more confident in the results if both experiments make similar findings.

On the same page, your reporter makes similar mistakes in commenting on the absence of the Fermilab director from the celebration honouring Burton Richter. The article implies this is because of bad blood; in fact it was simply because the Fermilab director was out of the country for personal matters that could not be rescheduled, a fact that could easily have been checked.