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Also, this: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/benefits/

I think the temporary capture of antiprotons and antielectrons has been achieved before

You are correct. For example the Fermilab Antiproton Source, which creates antiprotons and stores them, has been in operation since 1985 [1], while the Fermilab Recycler has held onto a continuous stash of antiprotons for over a month [2]. And these are by no means the very first machines to capture and store antimatter, I'd have to dig though the history a bit more to find an earlier example.

Production of Anti-hydrogen (antiproton orbited by a positron) seems to have been achieved in 1995 at CERN, with Fermilab confirming production in 1997 [3]. But those atoms were destroyed immediately after being created, this is the first time I've heard of anyone successfully storing anti-hydrogen for any long period of time. So yes, the headline is misleading, we've been capturing antimatter for quite some time, it's the fact that you are capturing the neutrally charged anti-hydrogen (antiproton -1, positron +1, total = 0) that's the real news.

I think the temporary capture of antiprotons and antielectrons has been achieved before

You are correct. For example the Fermilab Antiproton Source, which creates antiprotons and stores them, has been in operation since 1985 [1], while the Fermilab Recycler has held onto a continuous stash of antiprotons for over a month [2]. And these are by no means the very first machines to capture and store antimatter, I'd have to dig though the history a bit more to find an earlier example.

Production of Anti-hydrogen (antiproton orbited by a positron) seems to have been achieved in 1995 at CERN, with Fermilab confirming production in 1997 [3]. But those atoms were destroyed immediately after being created, this is the first time I've heard of anyone successfully storing anti-hydrogen for any long period of time. So yes, the headline is misleading, we've been capturing antimatter for quite some time, it's the fact that you are capturing the neutrally charged anti-hydrogen (antiproton -1, positron +1, total = 0) that's the real news.

Dark matter- God of the gaps. Can't explain something? Dark matter! That magical substance that is everywhere it wants to be, any way you need it to be!

Can't explain the missing mass of Beta decay? Introduce new particle! Can't explain how electrons are confined to the nucleus? Introduce new particle! Can't explain the inertial mass of particles? Introduce new particle!

So yeah, introducing new particles to explain discrepancies in observations is something totally unheard of and not something a real scientist would do...

Neutrinos interact so infrequently with normal matter that attenuation wouldn't be a problem, perhaps collimation would pose challenging. Right now Fermilab is shooting neutrinos through a 1000 kilometers of dirt and rock.

No they aren't, but I bet they have enough luminousity in their beam to make reconfirmation a bit easier. Maybe they'll shoot a neutrino beam at the detector;

* The neutrino beam is produced using 8 GeV protons from the Fermilab booster.
        * The neutrinos are delivered in bursts lasting 1.5 millionths of a second, 5 times per second.
        * The BooNE horn is used to focus the intense, high-energy particle beam and create an intense beam of neutrinos. The horn:
            -operates at 170 kA for 150 millionths of a second;
            -pulses five times per second;
            -must be able to withstand these extreme conditions for 100 million pulses.
        * The BooNE horn has already endured more pulses than any other horn ever!
        * By switching the polarity of the horns, the neutrino beam can be converted into an anti-neutrino beam.
About the BooNE neutrino beam

If 8Gev is interesting imagine how exiting 7Tev would be! It's not like many of the neutrinos are going to hit anything between CERN and FermiLab.

The reason we don't have a lot of production is no one has put together a system dedicated to making antimatter.

But we do, the Fermilab Antiproton Source. By my calculations, it currently has about an order of magnitude higher production rate than the parent's prediction (which originally comes from an un-sourced section of the wikipedia article on antimatter).

Fermilab had a beam loss event in 2003 (beam came into contact with part of the ring). The beam drilled a 2.8 mm hole through a 5mm tungsten support. It also etched a groove 25 cm long and 1.5 mm deep into a stainless steel collimator (after passing through the tungsten). Apparently this took about 8.3 ms (over several turns of the beam) before the beam dissipated.

I'm guessing if you could insert your hand fast enough (not possible, even if there wasn't a vacuum tube) you would end up with a nice small hole drilled through your hand.

This is the report from the Fermi incident:

http://beamdocs.fnal.gov/DocDB/0011/001185/001/FN-751.pdf

These are just my experience. I've worked in SSN maneuvering (reactor plant control) rooms, and at Fermilab, the Experimental Areas, D0, CDF control rooms and now days, the Main Control Room.

Keep the racks sealed, front and back as much as possible, to keep dust in the room from getting into the electronics. You might (or not) be amazed at how much dust a control room can collect over a year.

Include a fair amount of sound deadening foam. again, it's remarkable how loud pcs can get, way moreso if you have to add fan cooled crates and such.

Stay away from trackballs unless you can get *really* *awesome* trackballs, they tend to collect crap inside and are usu. kinda a PITA to clean.

Beware of the temptation to put in q00l tracklights, as they have a tendency to cause a lot of glare. Keep bookshelvs away from the consoles as much as possible.

Have your operators face AWAY from the hallway. Consider keycard access to keep distractions down. Spend the money on comfy high-backed chairs. Kitchen immediately adjacent to the control room. Bathroom nearby. Consoles should go UP, not out; it's easier to look up than turn your head and it _will_ make a difference.

I would not curve your workstations; skooching from one point to the next in a curved layout requires a unique trajectory for each endpoint; straight layouts are easier to run your chair along.

Here's mine http://www-visualmedia.fnal.gov/VMS_Site/gallery/stillphotos/2006/0000/06-0022-30D.hr.jpg kinda big, and i'm in the picture! Looks old and clunky but we manage.

HTH

The Tevatron has to be partially removed to allow the construction of Project X, which is an accelerator that complements the LHC but does not compete with it. Fermilab is in no danger of being closed due to obsolescence. Many of the people who work there are working on the LHC, and there are many other experiments located at Fermilab.

After congress canceled the Superconducting Super Collider, Europe focused on exploring the "Energy Frontier" and American scientists have focused on the "Intensity Frontier." There are also lots of collaboration and experiments that do not fit into either category. Of course, the rate at which the "Intensity Frontier" is explored does depend on the federal budget, but it will get done eventually.

See for example, the P5 Report:

"Particle physics in the United States is in transition. Two of the three high-energy physics colliders in the US have now permanently ceased operation. The third, Fermilab's Tevatron, will turn off in the next few years. The energy frontier, defined for decades by Fermilab's Tevatron, will move to Europe when CERN's Large Hadron Collider begins operating. American high-energy physicists have played a leadership role in developing and building the LHC program, and they constitute a significant fraction of the LHC collaborations--the largest group from any single nation. About half of all US experimental particle physicists participate in LHC experiments."

Fermilab plans to keep running neutrino experiments, and working on Project X, which will be developing small accellerator sections which could be combined to make a new, more powerful than ever, linear collider, or possibly even for Accellerator Driven Subcritical nuclear reactors, which could burn fuel that won't undergo fission on its own, or waste from curent reactors, and which would shut down when you turned off the beam.

So there is life for Fermilab beyond the Tevatron. But it is a little sad that what I see out my window isn't the Worlds Most Powerful Accellerator anymore.

See for example, the P5 Report:

"Particle physics in the United States is in transition. Two of the three high-energy physics colliders in the US have now permanently ceased operation. The third, Fermilab's Tevatron, will turn off in the next few years. The energy frontier, defined for decades by Fermilab's Tevatron, will move to Europe when CERN's Large Hadron Collider begins operating. American high-energy physicists have played a leadership role in developing and building the LHC program, and they constitute a significant fraction of the LHC collaborations--the largest group from any single nation. About half of all US experimental particle physicists participate in LHC experiments."

Fermilab plans to keep running neutrino experiments, and working on Project X, which will be developing small accellerator sections which could be combined to make a new, more powerful than ever, linear collider, or possibly even for Accellerator Driven Subcritical nuclear reactors, which could burn fuel that won't undergo fission on its own, or waste from curent reactors, and which would shut down when you turned off the beam.

So there is life for Fermilab beyond the Tevatron. But it is a little sad that what I see out my window isn't the Worlds Most Powerful Accellerator anymore.

I ended-up just putting it here:

http://home.fnal.gov/~mzs/tips/unix/ssh/stjput

Yeah I should have used pastebin, it was late.

I can't believe how badly slash code munged the script. Here is a link:

http://home.fnal.gov/~mzs/tips/unix/ssh/stjput

I've been using this in my ssh_config for a while:

ProxyCommand /usr/bin/ssh -24 -o PermitLocalCommand=no -qaxT gateway exec /usr/bin/nc %h %p

I find that -qaxT are really key to getting everything to work right and that's not documented well. You can of course forward X11 and what not, the trick is to not get the gateway involved, it just passes it on to the host and that sshd handles it. You don't need the pty on the gateway either, etc for the other options. That with ControlMaster and screen has really been a fantastic swiss army knife for dealing with lots of hosts.

In case you run into a gateway that does not have netcat installed or you can't get putty to work right with netcat, a coworker of mine came-up with a trick where you use a socks proxy. It pretty ingenious but socks can proxy any tcp since the v4 or so not just http. If you are concerned about eavesdroppers inside that will not do, also if you have shared accounts on the machine you are sshing from it's not ideal unless your firewall allows you to restrict a port to UID.

If you are using Windows and Kerberos then I have some builds of openssh here that are useful:

http://home.fnal.gov/~mzs/tips/windows/ssh/

This way you can use xterm or rxvt with cygwin and the MIT kerberos with ssh. I never really figured-out how to handled the mess that is Windows permissions (nothing like root:wheel it seems) so the files in those tarballs have my guids. There is a NOTES.txt there that explains a bit. You can see how I built. I have ssh38, scp38, sftp38 that supports gssapi and gssapi-with-mic. The 51 version supports only gssapi-with-mic.

for those people (probablly americans) stop critising the LHC becuase its bigger than the accelerator at fermilab. thats like kids arguing over who has a better skateboard.

Yes, it's exactly like that.

You seem to not understand that our TVs, sound systems, sports cars and particle accelerators are simply the adult extensions of our skateboards.

KEEP YOUR OPINION TO YOURSELF.

Why? It's called freedom of speech - perhaps you've heard of it.

You certainly seem to think that you have it, by virtue of the protocols you've issued.

News flash - since the beginning of time people have freely expressed opinion without regard for fact - and this is never more true than when the speaker is convinced that they are expressing facts. Now, I wasn't around at the beginning of time, so far as I recall, but it's my opinion that that behavior has been occurring for at least that long and is therefore neither limited to Americans nor to Fermilab fans.

My other opinion is that you're probably upset that Fermilab isn't in Europe and that you're simply jealous that you're missing out on all the fun.

But you are providing plenty - for me anyway. This snippet is simply priceless:

quite frankly i'm so sick of people critisising the LHC, especially the people at fermilab. firstly most people don;t know a damn thing about particle physics...

Uh - ok - would those be the people at Fermilab that don't know a damn thing?

BTW - my skateboard has something like 300 BHP, a gazillion ft-lbs of torque, and gets 21 miles per gallon when cruising at just over 100 miles per hour, when cruising that way for about 2 to 2.5 hours at a stretch. And as soon as I translate a gazillion ft-lbs into SI, I'll get back to you on what that means - or - I'll just wait for an opinion from Illinois on that.

Meanwhile, in my opinion, this sounds pretty cool:

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2010/today10-03-10Column_readmore.html

And almost finally, in my opinion, I deserve extra crunchy mod points just for avoiding the whole bigger vs. keeping it up line of jokes in response to your post (which given that there is NO NEWS in TFA, makes your complaint even funnier).

NOT IMPORTANT

That's the worst sig ever. In my opinion, you should have a higher opinion of yourself, even if that current sig summarizes the opinions in your post perfectly.

I think you should cheer up now and have a fabulous day, but that's just another one of my opinions.

I torture quarks for a living. I'll get my Ph.D. writing about how it sounds when they scream. Does this make me a bad person?

What do you expect, this is the closest they evert got to a beaver: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2009/today09-11-23.html (Scroll to the end of the page.)

International Committee on Future Accelerators Beam Dynamics section newsletter abstract under the URL.

While the emphasis in the six articles is on transmutation of nuclear waste and accelerator driven nuclear power plants, the same accelerators can generate neutrons to breed tritium from lithium. The fusion demonstration ITER will have blanket with lithium to demonstrate breeding since its fuel is a deuterium-tritium mixture.

It would be lovely for the US accelerator community if the US DHS forked over $1.5B for a system to breed tritium and, in its spare time, transmute long lived waste isotopes so used fuel rods would decay to radiation levels below that of natural uranium ore within one thousand instead of one hundred thousand years.

http://www-bd.fnal.gov/icfabd/Newsletter49.pdf

The theme is "Accelerator Driven Sub-Critical Assemblies (ADS) and its challenge to accelerators." This is a topic that could have a deep impact on the future of our society. As we all know, developing clean energy and protecting the environment are two top priorities in countries around the world. ADS is an accelerator-based technology that may provide a viable solution to these major problems. Jiuqing collected 6 excellent articles in the theme section. They give a comprehensive review of this important accelerator field, including valuable lessons learned from the past.

Despite the so-called "rivalry" too many science "news" outlets have played up, Fermilab puts it on the front page. Always nice to recall that in the end everyone benefits from this big boy coming online.

The International Committee on Future Accelerators periodically publishes "newsletters" with a theme. The most recent newsletter is on the subject given above. It may be obtained at

http://www-bd.fnal.gov/icfabd/

The theme is "Accelerator Driven Sub-Critical Assemblies (ADS) and its challenge to accelerators." This is a topic that could have a deep impact on the future of our society. As we all know, developing clean energy and protecting the environment are two top priorities in countries around the world. ADS is an accelerator-based technology that may provide a viable solution to these major problems. Jiuqing collected 6 excellent articles in the theme section. They give a comprehensive review of this important accelerator field, including valuable lessons learned from the past.

Time to activate the FNAL mole.

The eighth-largest particle machine ever built, the Recycler is the only one of its kind. While its cousins accelerate particles to higher and higher energies, the Recycler will store and condense antiproton beams, keeping the beam energy at a steady 8 GeV. This fundamental difference allowed physicists Gerry Jackson and Bill Foster to propose the use of permanent magnets, and the Recycler ranks as the world's largest assembly of permanent magnets.

And yes, that is the Bill Foster who is now our Congressman...

Three that I have enjoyed are:
Marshal Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL
The Atomic Museum, Albuquerque, NM
The Cosmosphere, Hutchinson, KS
There are many more possibilities. Most large government labs, such as Fermilab have tours and/or a visitor center. Most large universities have museums. These are often small but sometimes excellent and some have not been "dumbed down" like some of the larger public museums.

but there's no evidence for it (if you have real citations to the contrary, as opposed to uninformed pop-sci speculation, I'll be glad to see it.)

I don't know where you draw that line. The original article I read went offline. Here's a bad synopsis:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090203130708.htm

the theorist in question: http://astro.fnal.gov/people/Hogan/

The basic idea is that gravity waves are missing. The detector we built to find them hasn't, but has found noise that is a near-perfect match for a predictive model by Hogan that our Universe is a 2D shell and the 3D we experience is a 'holographic' projection from that quantized shell. In a real universe there ought to be gravity waves.

I don't have a PhD in particle physics, but that's my understanding of the idea. To the GP's point, on Facebook I list my religion as 'Free Thinker'. To quote the philosopher Kevin Smith:

I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant.

Manmade neutrinos aren't just fission byproducts - particle collisions can also create neutrinos. One of the links mentions this neutrino beam results from proton collisions at the accelerator at Fermilab: http://www-nova.fnal.gov/images/NOVA-LookingNorth.jpg [fnal.gov]

Control the protons - control the neutrinos.

The part that I can't understand is how they can make such ... well-collimated beam, and I can't find any reference that explains the mechanism clearly (say, clear enough to a physicist whose expertise isn't particle physics).

I mean, how exactly should the protons be controlled? Given that neutrinos take away so little momentum and are always ultra relativistic, it probably doesn't matter what direction (and how fast) protons or the decay source were moving at ... and AFAICS the only other thing that might produce anisotropic distribution is producing neutrinos from some polarized source (i.e. spin polarized particles) ... but at least when I think about them as being analogous to dipole radiation, the angular dependence can't be too sharp.

I'm more curious about this from the link: "NOvA requires a high intensity neutrino beam." I thought we couldn't really control neutrinos. We can't redirect them and can't block them. We can only detect a few in a billion (or probably more) and produce them as result of nuclear reactions.

Many fewer than a few per billion. The mean free path of a neutrino is light years - in lead: http://www.ps.uci.edu/physics/news/nuexpt.html

Manmade neutrinos aren't just fission byproducts - particle collisions can also create neutrinos. One of the links mentions this neutrino beam results from proton collisions at the accelerator at Fermilab: http://www-nova.fnal.gov/images/NOVA-LookingNorth.jpg

Control the protons - control the neutrinos.

First things first: I'm not an alarmist, and I don't think the LHC will blow up the Earth.

That said, I'd like to point out that not nearly all of that 10^20 eV is available to make new particles/black holes in the center of mass frame of the collision. Since all the collision products will have to have a ton of momentum in the direction that the cosmic ray was originally traveling, the available energy for creating new, potentially dangerous particles scales with the square root of the product of the energies (see http://www-bd.fnal.gov/public/relativity.html for a pretty good explanation of where this square root dependency comes from).

In contrast, the LHC will collide two particles in the TeV range head-on, which means the collisions have more of a chance of creating an "exotic" than even a 10^20 eV particle hitting stationary atmosphere.

However, I bet two high-energy cosmic rays each with energy > 10^14eV sometimes collide with *each other*, and that collision would have more available energy than the LHC collisions. The big question is how often does this happen? If collisions like these happen at a slow enough rate, I could imagine that the LHC might put Earth into unexplored territory in terms of numbers of collisions with ~10^14eV of available (i.e. not constrained to producing products with high momentum) energy.

I trust that the physicists have worked out the rates of these head-on, two-cosmic-ray collisions. Otherwise they would have no right saying that cosmic ray history shows that the LHC will be safe. Still, the only defense based on cosmic rays I've heard has been talking about cosmic rays hitting atmosphere, which isn't valid. Does anyone have a good link to a website analyzing the frequency of head-on two-cosmic-ray collisions?

Does anyone know how much energy this takes? They mentioned the previous petawatt laser experiment that was decommissioned, but I didn't see where it mentioend the power required for this experiment. If the laser guess by kdawson is correct, we could be looking at a mere 400 joules per 1E11 positrons. Which (if I'm not mistaken) would be an unheard of efficiency for creating antimatter! (Can someone verify? My brain is fried at the moment.)

What I find interesting is that this level of production is competitive with Fermilab. Even if they ran this twice an hour, they'd handily meet or outstrip Fermilab production.

Even more interesting is the possibility for mass manufacture of antimatter. By using mass-produced gold targets, you could rotate the materials in and out of the machine every few seconds, creating previously unseen amounts of antimatter. Such a process could easily provide materials for an antimatter catalyzed fission drive. Possibly even enough to power new forms of interplanetary propulsion.

Am I the only one who's getting really excited about this? /dreamer

If the reality is that antimatter does not exist

How can it not exist when Fermilab churns out over 12.4E10 antiprotons per hour? I'll grant you that Fermilab is nowhere near productive enough to power a starship, but there is supposed to be a few hundred years separating today from Star Trek. I think it's okay to gloss over how they increased production.

But where are we going to find these megatons of hydrogen??? It doesn't exist naturally

You mean, other than all that hydrogen the sun spews out? Or the hydrogen that Jupiter is composed of? Or the large quantities of hydrogen produced when you get electricity near sea-water? Or the truly MASSIVE amounts of hydrogen floating through deep space?

I mean, this isn't rocket science. (Well, save for when it is. :-P) Being the most common element in the universe, hydrogen is relatively easy to come by. If it wasn't, the space program wouldn't use Liquid Hydrogen/Oxygen engines. The only issue with using hydrogen to power cars and trucks is making hydrogen creation both economical and clean. Shifting the power-generation costs up to the grid definitely helps. If we then make the grid clean (e.g. nuclear power), our energy infrastructure will then be clean.

Thus the fuel cycle of the Star Trek starships makes perfect sense: Use the largest fusion reactors in existence (i.e. stars) to power the antimatter creation equipment installed at fuel-production starbases. Transfer this antimatter to starships as they drop by for refueling.

I'll leave the simple issue of how to collect gigawatts to terawatts of solar power as an exercise to the reader. That's already a solved engineering problem that we'd probably be using today if it weren't for the pesky dangers of long-range microwave transmissions.

What do you mean by "finally"? Fermi has discovered tons of particles over its lifetime and probably will continue to be very useful in particle physics.

Here's a link to the top ten discoveries:

I'm to young to really have a full comprehension of the politics at the time...but the cancellation was due to both some financial mismanagement, and competition with the International Space Station, which ran to 100 billion. I hear stories about how biologists were going to their congress-critter's office complaining about how the "proton racetrack" was going to cause them to loose all their funding. It's disgusting that different disciplines have to compete in this way. But if congress decides one day that project A is interesting, it should complete project A. When project A takes 12 years, and project B comes along after 2, and congress decides to switch funding from project A to project B...no project will ever be completed.

As I said, fire some bureaucrats, hire some auditors, help keep it on budget and avoid over-spending. But make sure the science gets done.

All that said, cooperating on international projects is a fantastic idea, and the US contributions to CERN should not be discounted. But a little competition greases the wheels of discovery.

Note that this year, the ITER funding was zeroed, and Fermilab was cut by $94 million, a change which required "voluntary" rolling furloughs. This was partially fixed by a supplemental funding bill in June, but due to the current budget crisis, the 2009 budget is passed under a "continuing resolution", which means that Fermilab is short and ITER is zero again, and we have to again grovel before our congress-critters for funding, which is highly unlikely since Wall Street is obviously more important than science.

The US is at a serious disadvantage.

I can't remember the details, but didn't Fermilab or some outfit on this side of the pond screw up when they produced one or two of the large magnets needed for the LHC about a year back? Wikipedia to the rescue, it was Fermilab and KEK[1] More details here

Not to knock too hard on Fermilab, they do a lot of great work, it's just too funny that they screwed up on an important part for a rival's project. Uh, yeah, we, uh, can't believe we did that.

I know you are being funny, but CERN uses Scientific Linux. [scientificlinux.org]

SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters.

I know you are being funny, but CERN uses Scientific Linux.

SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters.

Won't happen. We're hard at work on it right now (except when we're reading slashdot...), and we're making some amazing leaps forward in analysis techniques, but we simply won't have enough data to be sufficiently sensitive to the Higgs by the time the accelerator shuts down. We might find evidence or even strong evidence, but not strong enough to call it discovery. We do have enough data to exclude certain mass ranges, however. When you combine our data with D0's (the experiment that did the analysis in TFA), we have enough sensitivity to say that the Higgs, if it is the standard model Higgs (and the lightest SUSY Higgs is sufficiently similar that this holds for it, too), does not have a mass quite close to 170 GeV (which is pretty close to the mass of the top quark, incidentally). http://www-d0.fnal.gov/Run2Physics/WWW/results/prelim/HIGGS/H64/

We do liquid helium for superconducting magnets, that need to be that cold, but computers we just cool with water pumped to/from a nearby pond. Of course then you have to deal with the zebra mussels...

The three physical (mass eigenstate) neutrinos [nu_1, nu_2, nu_3] are mixtures of the three interaction states [nu_e, nu_mu, n_tau] and are related by a rotation matrix R called the MNS matrix. It's just a matrix rotation.

Today we do believe we understand the "solar neutrino problem" in terms of mixing of the three states. For the solar neutrinos, in fact mixing due to matter is dominant (rather than mixing due to the masses). There are numerous neutrino experiments going on today, but so far they have only been sensitive to the two mass differences (which are now pinned down quite precisely). We still don't know the absolute mass scale. Several experiments have set upper limits however. They are all in the 1 eV range and come from cosmology, or direct searches in tritium beta decay. The next major experiment to determine the absolute value of the mass is KATRIN. Some other upcoming experiments are Double CHOOZ, Daya Bay, T2K (Tokai to Kamioka), and in the US, MINOS.

There are anomalies in the existing data, however. I don't think finding the mass will be the last word on this subject.

This does not necessarily mean it's in Switzerland

http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/ Take a look at the right-hand side of the page. It lists several links to both papers and press releases describing discoveries made during the last couple of years. And these are only those analyses that were deemed "press" worthy. Most get published in journals which you probably wouldn't ever bother to investigate before trolling here.

And that's just CDF. There are several other ongoing experiments at Fermilab, which I don't know as much about.

That comment was not a troll. To a Christian, if the knowledge gained at facilities such as Fermilab is not in the Bible, it is unnecessary. If the knowledge is in the Bible, it is redundant. Either way, basic research funding is a very low priority.

That's what you and the OP are both doing. Fact is, Bush has been trying to increase funding for physics research. It was (the Democrat-controlled) Congress which cut Fermilab's budget.

there will be no natural PeV neutrino source

they broadcast spherically or in a beam towards us

Interestingly, if you turn the paper side-ways, it kind of looks like Robert Wilson Hall with it's associated obelisk.

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/about/campus/architecture.html

Oh, and Wilson's ID number is 014, not 000001 as mentioned below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Robert_Wilson_ID_badge.png

From what I can find online - Frank Shoemaker is a Princeton professor working on neutrino detection. Here and here.

From what I can find online - Frank Shoemaker is a Princeton professor working on neutrino detection. Here and here.

The date on the fax actually seems significant... TFA suggests that this was received by Fermilab just over a year ago, which was not long after the (very well publicized) Fermilab-manufactured quadropole triplet failure at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.

According to a 2006 Princeton Physics News article (page three of the PDF), Frank Shoemaker was a pioneer in using quadopole doublets to focus particle beams ... coincidence?

The timing seems suspect to me.

Expanding upon your "significance of 7 rows for both third and first stanza" theory, I immediately notice that the Wilson Hall building has 7 columns (count them: here and here. Your suggestion appears helpful.

If the orientation of the columns is rotated 90deg to make them rows, the stanzas may map to the columns in the building. If we assume the messages are significant, and the correlation to building "rows" is significant, and the left over "8th rows" from stanzas are significant.. we could derive all sorts of possibilities for the mapping of the remaining rows to a position in the building. Again, seeing how others here are much better at finding mathematically significant aspects than I am, I will throw this theory out and see if you or someone else can parse it.. because I believe the "25 columns in the last row of Stanza 1, 21 columns in the last row of Stanza 3" will need to be parsed somehow.

Also, speaking of my lack of math background-- can anyone post something useful for the second stanza? I know John and Geoff (linked crackers) have decoded the three character string below the second stanza, as being "508 (0Ã--1fc) or 2812 (0xafc)" but what about the second stanza itself? If it's base sixteen encoded can someone work on decoding it? We are really working with 2/3 of the available information here, and I think the remaining third will provide a lot of momentum.

also, as I expect this will continue long after this story is no longer at the top of the page, anyone who wants to collaborate via e-mail, may feel free to contact me. my email address is encoded as follows ;) ... myslashdotusernamewhichisfourcharacters.slashdot at gmail. Now I really wish I'd looked closer at the original story, instead of glancing and thinking, "wow, lots of math and the letter is probably a prank.. what else is there to read on slashdot today.."

The string of 3 symbols between the second and third parts may be simply SFC => Shoemaker, F. C. => Shoemaker, Frank C. (F. C. Shoemaker via)