Shutdown Looms at Pioneering American Atom Smasher

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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For the past 25 years, the particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has been operating as the most powerful ‘atom smasher’ in the world. The crown has now passed to the scientists at Cern and the Large Hadron Collider and operating funding has dried up.

On Friday, physicists will shut down the facility's accelerator called the Tevatron, a once-unrivaled atom smasher that has been eclipsed by the Large Hadron Collider, buried beneath the border of France and Switzerland.
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I guess this is good. We can't stop funding the expansion of our understanding of the universe and everything in it but this is obviously dated.


Keep looking up!
 
We are slowly witnessing the end of American exceptionalism. We're on the way down, the rest of the world is on the way up.

This program was bound to be cut, but you can definitely expect the arts and sciences to see less and less funding as we slide toward insolvency. We'd rather invest in wars and mass incarceration.
 
Lith1um said:
We are slowly witnessing the end of American exceptionalism. We're on the way down, the rest of the world is on the way up.

This program was bound to be cut, but you can definitely expect the arts and sciences to see less and less funding as we slide toward insolvency. We'd rather invest in wars and mass incarceration.
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The LHC is internationally funded. The only reason it's where it is is because of it's geological stability. It has nothing to do with other countries taking up what the US failed to do.
 
It will be a glorious day when the US Air Force needs a bake sale to find funding for a B-2 Jet Bomber...
 
I think we need a few more new colliders that can do new things to allow us to observe interactions previously invisible. It would probably be a good idea to build those facilities with future upgrades in mind too. This is where NASA should be involved if they ever expect to develop real space faring technology. The same could be said for many corporations that could benefit from increased understanding of quantum mechanics. They all want to make products based on this stuff but they need to step up and bother to research it.
 
Lith1um said:
We are slowly witnessing the end of American exceptionalism. We're on the way down, the rest of the world is on the way up.

This program was bound to be cut, but you can definitely expect the arts and sciences to see less and less funding as we slide toward insolvency. We'd rather invest in wars and mass incarceration.
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another word for that is financial irresponsibility. if we really were exceptional we would not have let ourselves go bankrupt. in other words we gave up any claim to such status years ago. so its not that its happening slowly, its that it already happened and the effects are showing.
 
It pretty well happened in 1998 with the trade agreement with china that caused the mass exodus of manufacturing out of the US. The only reason it took so long to be obvious to everyone but those involved in manufacturing was the housing bubble the government created propped everything up with easy loans and all but zero due diligence. So instead of a slow steady decline we had a catastrophic crash that crippled ours and the rest of the first world nations financial systems.
 
Sadness, but it makes sense, they lost a TON of their scientists to the LHC anyways. I toured the place a while back, was a fun time.
 
I personally am more worried about how the costs of education is rising out of control more so than I am about one atom smasher being shut down.

I mean it's still fucking there, as soon as someone can pay the power bill they can start smashing shit together again.
 
wtiger said:
It pretty well happened in 1998 with the trade agreement with china that caused the mass exodus of manufacturing out of the US. The only reason it took so long to be obvious to everyone but those involved in manufacturing was the housing bubble the government created propped everything up with easy loans and all but zero due diligence. So instead of a slow steady decline we had a catastrophic crash that crippled ours and the rest of the first world nations financial systems.
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behold! This.
 
It's sad to see a monument of American engineering close down, but science does work better as an international effort. So while the patriot in me wants the big accelerators to stay in this country, the scientist in me realizes that if it's more practical in France and Switzerland, it should be there.

To all of you "decline of America" whiners: why don't you just STFU for once.
 
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