Posted on 03/15/2003 10:48:51 PM PST by ItsJeff
Stop trying to get us all depressed.
he sounds suspiciously like "Marvin" (?), the robot in "Hitchiker's Guide to the Universe."
Instead they are working in Europe. This is a public sector crime.
Some questions won't be answered for decades that could have been answered quickly. Is it worth our public effort to understand the world as best we can? Now others are filling the gap, delayed, and it is not American facilities. We are not competing well among nations, not up to the level we need to sustain dominant preeminence.
Sounds like Waxahachie will continue to be a beautiful, nice place to live.
At least until the next bright idea comes along.
I know the feeling: I ate a sandwich at a Greek Pizza & Sub shop, my stomach was upset for a week....
:-)
Macaroni?
Explaining high energy particle physics to politicians must be like trying to teach, well, high energy particle physics to pigs.
I would explode from frustration.
yeah, that $40 billion dollar International Space Station sure was a winner, wasn't it? ><
Much better than knowing where the universe came from, or having a moon base, or other unimportant stuff like that.
Lol, look who got the zot. :P
I was all for it when I was younger. A shame it was canceled.
That is what keeps science interesting. Ansering the questions. If it creates more questions and answers then that means we continue investing in projects like the supercollider and motivates people to get more interested in the science. Using your logic, perhaps we should not have gone to the moon because it is a inanimate body in Earth's orbit.
I think you mean Project Mohole. I remember hearing about it in school.
Finding out what is deep within the Earth doesn't seem like the stupidest project to undertake, depending on the total cost. For instance the Russians have drilled the world's deepest hole and found valuable concentrations of minerals at great depths. As with all fundamental research, private enterprise doesn't usually show much interest until government funded research has blazed the trail and made clear where money might be made.
I was thinking an 18-mile long tunnel would be a great all-weather training facility for marathon runners.
Home Depot has purchased the Super Collider site to chop up and sell as fence post holes...
Strange and unusual circular underground restaurant. Call it The Circle, The Roundabout, Circa, etc. Fix it where the floor gradually goes round and round and call it The Carousel. Jet setters with private jets could fly in for very expensive dinners. It could be so expensive that people like me couldn't dine there, but we could work there. Dining, dancing in one of the buildings with entertainment venues. Imaginative lighting. Help me here . . .
A spa? Ideas on how to do a spa? An exclusive spa? Is there much water around? An airport nearby?
We live near a dam project that was supposed to be done about twenty years ago. The "endangered" pearly mussell or some such thing got in the way. They spent, I think, about $8,000,000.00 on the dam, scrapped that project, demolished the dam (which looked pretty far along), and now we don't live on a potential lake and aren't too sad about the lack of speedboats, jetskis and strange fishermen on our property to access the "lake". Now, we are close to the river on a hill overlooking it fairly closely. It just flabbergasts me how the government can be allowed to spend so much money and then just flush it all down the potty. It makes me think what taxes I pay are just an insignificant drop in the bucket. Hah! . . and the ironic thing in this dam business is that plenty of pearly mussells were found later in another area.
Depends on which direction it bends!
My point is that science has to compete in today's world by delivering useful results. Gone are the days where government trucks dumped money at the door to some dimly lit lair of theoretical physicists. Physicists need to understand that to pursue Grand Unification, they must also devote a few hours on multidisciplinary teams that solve contemporary problems.
As previous, I think the US was right to pursue the SNS and become the leader in neutron science over supercolliders and particle physics.
Where I think the US went astray was investing in NIF and letting ITER go probably to Asia. If anyone should be the lead in fusion research it should be us. We have the most to gain.
A better investment in neutron science would have been the original ANS design. We were ready to go with that until (Hillary) Clinton found out that it was a reactor (horrors!). So they switched to a more politically-correct accelerator source. As someone who has done neutron scattering work, it is my opinion that a steady-state, intense neutron source has it all over a pulsed source. Not to mention usable flux. Once you get 10 cm or so away from the target, the flux is down a factor of 1000. Not good when you're taking diffractograms that are on the order of hours of data collection time already.
Where I think the US went astray was investing in NIF and letting ITER go probably to Asia. If anyone should be the lead in fusion research it should be us. We have the most to gain.
The most promising one we killed (Clinton again) was the Integral Fast Reactor that was being developed at Idaho National Lab. That would have had immediate payoff, as well as developing a whole slew of related technologies (i.e., fuel reprocessing, actinide recycle, etc.). But, again, once Hillary got wind that it was a reactor concept that might actually benefit the nuclear industry, it was outta there faster than $h*t through a goose...
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