"In the 1970s it became respectable to model the economy as if it was a perfectly functioning, self-regulating machine, " says Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York.
The old linear accelerator at Stanford was repurposed, turning it from the machine that co-discovered a particle known as the charm quark (thus winning its operators a Nobel prize) into a factory for making particles called B mesons.