The Collider Calamity

Scientific American ^ | April 2006 | Editors of SciAm

[RightWingAtheist]

For decades, the big guns of American science have been the U.S. Department of Energy's particle colliders, which investigate the nature of matter by accelerating subatomic particles and smashing them together. Colliders at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered exotic particles such as the top quark and revealed phenomena that hint at new laws of physics. But this great American enterprise, like so many others, is now moving overseas. While the Europeans and Japanese build new particle accelerators, the U.S. is poised to shut down its premier colliders at Fermilab and SLAC over the next few years. And funding for Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is so tight that the lab could not have run its full slate of experiments this year without $13 million raised by a New York billionaire. The sad story began in 1993, when Congress canceled the $11-billion Superconducting Super Collider, the intended successor to Fermilab's Tevatron. CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, then started work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which would produce impacts with energies seven times higher than the Tevatron's. Because the greater energies could enable researchers to discover hypothesized particles such as the Higgs boson, American physicists flocked to the LHC, which is expected to begin operating next year.

[RightWingAtheist]

I'm making sure to ping some smart people, before the science-haters find this thread.

[orionblamblam]

Sigh, more of that atheistic man-centric "science" at work again. These "scientists" claim that the particles spin around inside the collider, but they ignore the very real possibility that the universe is actually spinning around the particles. I mean, they can't PROVE that's what's not going on...

[RightWingAtheist]

You forgot to add </DaveLoneRanger mode> to your post

[PatrickHenry]

SciencePing

An elite subset of the Evolution list. See the list's explanation at my freeper homepage. Then FReepmail to be added or dropped.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

So many people fight about funding research, so many things in government are being outsourced to contractors, that it's not surprising big science is hurting. Our loss.

[orionblamblam]

You're right...

[Waverunner]

Hopefully they will find the complimentary particle to the Higgs boson, the Higgs boson mate.


sorry - couldnt resist

[don'tbedenied]

Exactly. the bible does not reference these alleged particles. These "scientists" claim these alleged particles exist but I have yet to see a picture.

[RightWingAtheist]

Actually, according to supersymmetry, there is indeed a Higgs boson mate.

[roaddog727]

"Hopefully they will find the complimentary particle to the Higgs boson, the Higgs boson mate."

That would be the Higgs Bosom....

[P-40]

$11-billion Superconducting Super Collider

I remember when that project died. Sad. Odd how close the cost figure is to the money we pissed away on AIDS in Africa, or rather to buy lots of neat stuff for dictators in Africa.

[Quark2005]

The SSC is indeed a sad story, but there are other less noticed worries, here. Many of the particle accelerators we already have are hurting for funding. Often we talk about building to newest, most sensationalistic machine when we could be getting more bang for our buck by upgrading what we already have. There's a myriad of discoveries awaiting in data from experiments that have been already been run, but haven't been thoroughly analyzed by anyone yet, because of lack of manpower and outdated software. By simply hiring more people and streamlining the software analysis process at many of these labs (a much lower $$ expenditure), we could vastly increase our knowledge in nuclear & particle physics.

[BeHoldAPaleHorse]

Look at the so-called science of "high-energy physics." They claim to have found electrons, protons, neutrons, alpha particles, muons, mesons, et cetera, but I can't find any of those in the Bible, and the "scientists" can't show me a picture of even ONE of these particles. Then they try to claim that one can't know the exact whereabouts or speed of any of these particles, and they cite some guy named Heisenberg, but we know he was a Nazi trying to give Hitler the A-Bomb, so he's just another Bolshevik-Nazi-Darwinist.

If the four elements (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water) were good enough for the ancients, then they oughta be good enough for us.

Intelligent Chemistry: Teach the Controversy!

(OK, how was that?)

~()):~)>

[Waverunner]

Hopefully they would follow the rules of supersymmetry
( see post #10)

[vpintheak]

Nice smarmy elitist post there. It almost makes me feel inferior to you and your supreme logic and reasoning. KInd of makes me sick when I think about it.

[rlmorel]

I'm making sure to ping some smart people, before the science-haters find this thread.

LOL...too late!

[ckilmer]

I'm not so sure cancelling the super collider was such a bad move. Just from the point of view of aesthetics--a big science project in France probably means the yield of new science per science dollar spent will be very very low.
For more applied applications--the small budget projects I've seen in the US that look for "ignition" fusion reactions look pretty interesting.
Finally, the USA needs to be seriously focused on applied research so as to develop a new industrial base. This is pretty much what the USA is doing. Probably the biggest question is how do you get a new cheap form of energy so the world can get away from the oil complex. Question 2 how do you kill the cost of desalination so all the world's deserts can be turned green and thereby double the size of the habitable planet.

[rednesss]

Well the consolation prize here is that even though the next Enrico Fermi or Albert Einstein won't be coming from the USA, we are turning out more talented X-Box and Playstation gamers than any country on the face of the planet. That should keep us on the forefront of technology right?

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

On CSPAN, after the democrats shut down the super colider, a Democrat came on and said they were punishing Texas for electing Kay Bailey Hutchinson as senator.
I tried to find this in the CSPAN archives.
No luck because I could not remember the Democratic senator who made this statement.