Thanks La Lydia.
· List topics · post a topic · subscribe · Google ·
Posted on 01/22/2011 8:27:33 AM PST by La Lydia
In Batavia, Ill. — just west of Chicago — you can walk along trails through a thousand-acre restored prairie filled with rare species like compass plant and rattlesnake master. From the edge of the prairie, you can see, as well, a four-mile ring of concrete and steel. That is the berm above the Tevatron, a high-energy subterranean racetrack for particle beams and the heart of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab. Since 1983, scientists have been using the Tevatron to create spectacular collisions between subatomic particles whose ghostly traces have helped reveal the fundamental constituents of matter, like the top quark, discovered in 1995. The Department of Energy, which runs Fermilab, has now announced that for budgetary reasons it will be shutting down the Tevatron, which costs about $50 million a year to run, in late 2011.
The Tevatron has been superseded by the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, which is designed to operate at energies up to seven times higher. The two colliders have been in a race to find unequivocal evidence of the Higgs boson, a hypothetical elementary particle whose existence would help clarify and confirm the current theory of particle physics.
There are about 1,200 physicists doing experiments at the Tevatron, and many think shutting it down is a bad idea, especially given the problems with the Large Hadron Collider...currently working at half its potential energy level and...scheduled to shut down for repair and upgrades in 2012.
Physics is an international pursuit. Fermilab is home to physicists from all over the world, and other experiments will still take place there...Yet it’s lamentable to see the end of an era of high-energy particle experiments in America that defined the threshold of our understanding of matter.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My neighbor works at Fermi. No, he’s not a physicist. At least, I hope not...
be better if we spent money on an interocitor. the euros dont have anything to touch that.
http://www.shipbrook.com/jeff/interocitor/
My dad was a tool and die maker at Fermi. I got to work there one summer in the magnet factory. Cool, cool place.
You can actually blame George H. W. Bush for this one. About twenty years ago, there were plans to expand Fermilab by building the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider). GHWB moved the site to Texas, where it was never completed.
Gotta shut it down so more bureaucrats and welfare (individual and corporate) recipients can have their piece of the shrinking pie!
Obama has another project in mind, the TV-tron. It will be able to project Baracka-Flacka directly into your brain.
If I remember correctly, it wasn’t GHWB but rather Congress that ditched the Texas project because of mismanagement on the part of those who were supposed to be responsible for its development, who apparently believed they had an endless supply of money and no accountability. It is my impression that the physicists were running the project and there was no professional construction management involved to keep the scientists connected to fiscal reality. There was a vote to kill it in both houses of Congress. “Mistakes were made.”
Well we are broke as a nation and the GOP deserves a lot of the blame for that too. Lots of things are going to have to be defunded, were I making the choices basic R&D would be one of the last places I’d cut. But no one seems to care about R&D any more. Very Sad watching the USA decline into third world status, sending all the good paying jobs overseas (free trade) was not a very good idea. Now it will take a generation or two to recover, if it is even possible to recover.
It will critically hurt the employment picture and the economy in the little conservative suburb and in the surrounding conservative suburbs.
But that's what Obama is about, isn't it.
Destruction, here and there, little by little....like the frog-and-the-gradually-warming-water story. Soon, we won't be able to jump out of the pot.
Leni
Maybe that's all because it was GHWB's intention to slather Texas with money by insisting that the SSC be built there.
Even if the Tevatron is shut down, we'll still lead the world in mind numbing entertainment, government spending on nonproductive projects, and corporate taxation.
That seems to be true. We are turning into a nation that only cares about "me me me" and "now now now," with little regard for the future. Having said that, Fermilab is building a cool little experiment called the Holometer.
No, the site selection occurred under the Reagan administration. I don’t know why they chose Waco, in particular, but the lead physicist was from UT Austin. The politician who pushed it the most was Jim Wright.
For whatever reason, the site selection committee did not consider the costs of building the SSC where there were no pre-existing support staff such as physicists and engineers.
They could hardly built it in the middle of Austin or Cambridge. It had a 54-mile circumference and had to be built on flat land.
What about near Fermilab?
This whole ‘race’ to confirm a theoretical physics question is a totally bogus ruze. The real hunt going on at Fermi Lab and now at the LHC is for the production of nuclear fusion capture and next generation nuclear weapons. Anything else is totally laughable. I’ve got a Higgs Boson in my closet I’ll sell you.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.