bfesser
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Tevatron Shutdown
Yesterday was indeed a sad day for science in the United States. The Tevatron collider at Fermilab was shut down for the last time Friday afternoon.
<a
href="http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/223187/20111001/tevatron-smashes-higgs-boson-fermi-national-accelerator-laboratory-fermilab-large-hadron-collide
r.htm">News Article</a>
With the government cutting funding for fundamental research, I find myself more and more motivated to leave the country.
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Ozone
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Sad indeed!
There was talk (among the Accelerator-Group) of troubles at Fermilab in April (I was a nano-tech lecturer at the Health Physics Society annual
meeting). I suppose they were serious.
We were all thinking of a few lay-offs, etc. We certainly did not think that they would shut down the whole thing!
Damn! 
O3
[Edited on 1-10-2011 by Ozone]
-Anyone who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
--Albert Einstein
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Endimion17
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I was stunned to read about it earlier this morning. What the hell is happening there?
Supposedly they're "narrowing down their research" and "trying to become leaders in ... narrow(ed) research fields"...
Don't get me wrong, but this is the similar crap we've all heard from NASA when the Space Shuttle program was about to get sacked.
I suppose Americans will just stay passive as usual. You've got some serious problems there, not just with science. Science, health and education
departments are all greatly suffering because of enormous army budget. Your government is taking away your freedom, and killings and tortures are
becoming a normal thing, called "advanced dealing with". Advanced? Few decades ago those things were considered to be a great shame, something what
was supposed to be kept quiet, and civilians were trying to disclose it.
But nowdays it's celebrated! Nationalism on the rise.
Instead of going forward in time, everything seems to go backward. Why are you people so passive about it?
I've been closely monitoring what's happening for a decade and I really see a downfall of a great country. I hoped it's just a slope, but it sure
doesn't look like it.
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hissingnoise
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The Fermilab collider seems to have been superseded by the CERN machine
Whoops! Just thinking about high-energy physics gives me a large hadron . . .
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DDTea
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Hah! Good one.
It really is sad, though, that there's such a reactionary element in American politics that no longer gives these national scientific endeavors a high
priority. This idea of going back to a utopian "year zero," with libertarian ideals and a religious faith in laissez-faire capitalism, recalls the
beliefs of Pol Pot or the Taliban. It's at conflict with both modern society *and* an accurate reading of history.
Big science--be it the network of National Labs, the space program, the Manhattan project, or even sailing across the Atlantic in 1492--has always
required government support. The countries that didn't think those programs were important quickly became minor players in history. With that in
mind, the shutdown of the Tevatron without any suitable replacement on US soil is a crying shame.
However, I wouldn't write off military funding as simply being misplaced effort. Consider this article in the NY Times: U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels The US Military is the world's single largest consumer of fossil fuels, so it is certainly
in their interest to make the fossil fuel to alternative fuel jump. Having an essentially unlimited budget and high-quality scientific facilities,
staff, and a pool of highly qualified scientific contractors, they are in an opportune position to spearhead this research.
Since military technology often finds civilian applications, I am remaining optimistic. I think the US is seeing a period of transition and not
stagnation. There are forces at play that are far too large for the citizens to counter, so at best we can just hold on until the storm passes. For
now, we need to work on marginalizing the mindless reactionaries in politics.
[Edited on 10-1-11 by DDTea]
"In the end the proud scientist or philosopher who cannot be bothered to make his thought accessible has no choice but to retire to the heights in
which dwell the Great Misunderstood and the Great Ignored, there to rail in Olympic superiority at the folly of mankind." - Reginald Kapp.
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Endimion17
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DDTea, you seem to forget that during the WW2 and the Cold war, the military budget was actually spent on useful stuff. Nuclear energy, microwaves,
microchips, etc. A lot of hideous attrocities have been done by the USA (almost none of which werbrought to justice, because USA thinks it's above the
international law), but the science was actually useful. Most of the 20th century science and technology was backed up by the Cold war.
Today's military budget of America is less into useful stuff, and more into "kill more efficiently in ways which won't affect the killers". I think we
all know about Wikileaks.
I don't see any progress in science made by the American military.
The money from tax payers is used for turning your country into a militarized state which, more than ever, exploits the turmoils of smaller,
struggling countries. It sucks in money and poor, uneducated civilians and turns them into people with psychological scars that return home (if not
killed) and slowly corrode their families and surroundings.
It's no longer a questionable opinion from some commie-wannabe university professor. It turned into a blatantly obvious fact.
What surprises me is the unbelieveable passivity of American people. For god sake, your country has one of the best systems in the world which enables
you to fight back. Not just the system, but the whole society is different. You are able to do something and you can be heard. You're fortunate to
have that.
But if your education continues to dwindle, a critical mass of morons will be created and there won't be any hope left to deal with the situation
without a some kind of civil war.
Keeping you eyes closed and walking forward eventually leads to crashing with a street pole.
Don't think I'm angry because I hate America. Far from that. If I hated it, I'd grin with satisfaction. I'm angry because America is some kind of a
role model. At least it was. It isn't anymore.
I don't have a single friend/acquaintance that would like to live in USA anymore. 15 years ago, and before, it was very popular.
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White Yeti
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This is an opportunity. The LHC is the world's largest collider to date, but it will one day be shut down as well. It's a chance, a challenge for the
United States to build a particle collider, bigger and better than the LHC. It's a shame that the funding is cut though, it will take a looong time to
fund the construction of a new collider without government funding.
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DDTea
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Endimion: did you read the NY Times article that I linked to? Do you think that applied research in alternative fuel sources could lead to useful
developments/technologies in the civilian sector?
If you do think so, then I don't know how you can make such sweeping generalizations like, "todays' military budget...is less into useful stuff, and
more into 'kill more efficiently'..."
For better or worse, the US military is a complex beast. It's almost a parallel society within the US. But because they are the best funded sector
of American society today, I think they are in the opportune position to conduct basic and applied research. Hopefully, some of it will find its way
"outside the fence" of secrecy.
"In the end the proud scientist or philosopher who cannot be bothered to make his thought accessible has no choice but to retire to the heights in
which dwell the Great Misunderstood and the Great Ignored, there to rail in Olympic superiority at the folly of mankind." - Reginald Kapp.
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White Yeti
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Endimion: You know that the US military developed the internet, or should I say, the internets. One web is civilian, and the other is military. Lots
of inventions and innovations are by product of military investment. Sure, some of the weapons developed by the military will go to waste, but the
military doesn't just make guns, it makes so much other stuff I don't even know where to begin.
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Ozone
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Perhaps there is truth in this (when the majority do not pay taxes and can vote to maintain that condition, then we have critical mass):
"But if your education continues to dwindle, a critical mass of morons will be created and there won't be any hope left to deal with the situation
without a some kind of civil war."
Aside:
"The LHC is the world's largest collider to date..."
Regardless, had we not sh*tcanned the Super Collider (aka. Desertron), this would not be the case...(and, IMHO, similar politics are currently in
play).
Globalism...blech!
O3
[Edited on 2-10-2011 by Ozone]
-Anyone who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
--Albert Einstein
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peach
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| Quote: | | You know that the US military developed the internet, or should I say, the internets |
Tim Berners Lee (from England) working at CERN developed the tubes when he set out HTML. It was being used by CERN as some easy way to communicate
across the labs.
But yes, the US millitary did a lot more to turn it into a web.
Equally, Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates, and the vast, vast army of nameless and faceless nerds behind them, were equally responsible for turning it
from a black screen with messages appearing on it to something that's close to being able to wipe my ass for me and then show me a photo and
statistical analysis of the process with one push of the a button on the TV remote.
The shutting down the space shuttle and large experiments is always sad, and it will continue to happen. It has to happen because eventually the
pieces of equipment outlive their ability to serve a purpose.
The shuttles were getting dangerously old. NASA had already been fighting with congress and petitions from school kids over issues like the space
shuttle visiting Hubble to update it and bump it up into a higher orbit. After the more recent accidents started appearing, they were worried they
would loose another shuttle and crew. But, after lots of arguing, they continued to run the shuttles for a while longer; beyond their use by date.
Now we have the ISS, a far larger and better equipped permanent platform in space, there is no need to be squeezing everyone into the shuttle and to
then have to land again when it starts running out of supplies. I love watching the launch videos, and still do (I was pissed I never made it to the
US to watch one), but it was time for that to end.
Other countries will build shuttles if there is a need and the US doesn't. Russia's already got one, they just never use it. Astronauts and cosmonauts
are sent up on things like Soyuz rockets. And the majority of technology in space is sent up unmanned by private companies shooting them out of Russia
and France, which is much cheaper and safer than sending an entire crew up on the shuttle to do a space dump in orbit.
As the old goes out, the new comes in. There are many amazing experiments being done with equally amazing equipment and people don't even realise
they're there because the general public won't understand it or it hasn't caught on with media.
An unquestionable factor in the experiments below is collaboration. They are huge, state the art projects that do not suffer nationalistic arrogance
lightly.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Examples (maybe someone else can include some impressive ones I've missed?);
Neutrino detectors.
Big news recently when some (supposedly) travelling faster than light were found.
There are a number of them all over the planet.
Neutrinos barely interact with normal matter, they will zip through the earth. They originate from space. The detectors are huge tanks filled with
ultra pure water. The internal walls are covered in photomultiplier tubes. When a neutrino finally interacts with the contents of the tank, it emits a
photon. The photon hits the multiplier tube and a cascade of current falls out, showing it has arrived.
To filter out noise from other sources, they are buried in mines and under mountains.
This is the one at Sudbury in Canada, 2km underground. It's 6m across, filled with a thousand tons of D2O and contains 9,600 multiplier tubes.
Princeton. There's one at at Lawrence Berkley that has picked up fluxes from the reactors all the way off in Japan and Korea.
The super-k in Japan. A mile underground. 50,000 tons of ultra pure water. 11,146 tubes. One of the tubes popped. The shock wave popped about 6,000 of
the others. They're $3k each.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Gravity Probe B
Testing Einstein's theory that if mass distorts space time like a marble on a sheet of silk creating a dip, then if that marble is turned (as a planet
does), does the fabric twists around it?
Sent up by NASA, kept running with money from Saudi Arabi.
It contains spheres, accurate to 40 atoms from perfection. They function as gyroscopes, spun up with helium jets and their spin measured by
superconducting quantum interference detectors.
The probes telescope fixes on a guide star and manoeuvres the probe to keep it aligned. If space time is twisting around earth as the planet turns,
the gyroscopes will not spin in a perfect orbit.
The entire analytical section is pure quartz, so accurately built that it is held together by intermolecular attraction; there are no glues, welds,
bolts or screws involved. The whole thing is in a dewar, floating around in space.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The Z-machine (pinch)
USA
That's a nice photo hey? No DIY tesla coil can compete with that.
This stores up electrical charge and then discharges a gargantuan amount of power into a tiny space; we're talking hundreds of terawatts. And they're
already thinking about going to a petawatt; 70 million amps at 24 million volts.
The current vapourises the target, forms a plasma and then compresses it, allowing them to study very high pressures and temperatures, such as those
needed for fusion.
--------------------------------------------------------------
LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory)
Washington and Louisiana
Two tunnels at a right angle to each other, a collection of mirrors, beam splitters and lasers form an particularly large interferometer.
The arms are 4km each and contain high vacuum tunnels. The beam makes 75 passes up and down.
The 10kg mirrors, suspended by thin wires, will move as gravitational waves rock them. But the sensitivity is on the order of a proton's dimensions.
Half a micron (about a thousandth of a hairs worth) of movement is considered out of order.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The National Ignition Facility
USA
The worlds biggest laser pen.
422 megajoule capacitor bank, 7,680 Xenon flash lamps.
A timing laser is fired into an array of over 3,000 slabs of the amplifier glass (as seen on the right of the table). The main lamps fire to amplify
the pulse, which bounces back and forth, repeating the process, to pick up more energy.
A 500 terawatt pulse emerges, and is then frequency double through these babies to green light.
Which enters the chamber.
And then lands on that, the target. As per the Z-machine, instantly vapourising it and forming a plasma that can then go into fusion, relying on
inertial confinement.
--------------------------------------------------------------
JET (Joint European Torus)
The largest and most successful attempt at continuous fusion power generation. Currently living in Oxford, England, but soon to be rebuilt in Europe,
ten times bigger.
Magnetic coils around the walls produce a circle of flux inside the core.
Deuterium and Tritium (from water and lithium, one of the most abundant of elements), are injected and ionised, causing them to stick to the lines of
flux and orbit the core, not touching the walls.
5 million amps go through the plasma to warm it up. Then neutral beams are injected from an accelerator to go higher. Finally, radio frequeny waves
synchronised to the orbital periods of the ions are used to go up further.
JET can heat plasmas for around 60 seconds at over 100 million Kelvin. I seem to remember they've managed almost 300 million in there.
If the new reactor proves successfully, this will power the average home on a bucket of water and laptops lithium battery for an entire year, and the
by product is helium (a rare element).
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White Yeti
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My personal favourite neutrino detector is the ice cube neutrino observatory:
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Polverone
Now celebrating 21 years of madness
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Thread Split
2-10-2011 at 11:37 |
Polverone
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Atheism/theism argumentation has been sent to Detritus. Don't start it up again.
PGP Key and corresponding e-mail address
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hissingnoise
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Yes Polverone, you are, as usual, unerring in your drive to protect us from our 'weaker moments'. 
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bfesser
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Sorry, Polverone. I didn't really intend to start <em>that</em> argument with my comment--I guess I should have thought it through more
before posting.
Back on the topic of fundamental research:
Trifluoroacetic, how's your <a href="http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=11056">cyclotron</a> project coming along?
It's been a while since you've given us an update. Have you come up with a catchy name/acronym for it yet?
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