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You need to get into high energy physics then.

You need to get into high energy physics then.

In fact I can't really see anyone being interested in the daily routine of scientists at Fermilab...

http://beamdocs.fnal.gov/DocDB/0022/002210/001/overthruster.pdf

He did do work on parts of the recycler ring at Fermilab, which is exactly a place to store antimatter...

ack

and could somebody explain to me how homeland security made it on the aaas's lists for the candidates. How does that relate to science? I know a lot of funding goes into stuff like face recognition software these days, to fullfill the NSA's wet Owellian dreams, but then you could also put a topic like war on there. If you are for war, you are for Science, because so much research is sponsored by the military complex.

And anything that really counts, like evolution, NASA's mars program and the high energy physics funding catastrophy http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/FY08budgetimpactonFermilab.html isn't even touched. How could this useless site get onto slashdot.

This is a lame duck president. Congress will wait for a new president before doing anything. Before the budget will get passed there will be at least one continuing resolution where funding will be at the current very low levels across the board for science. Then Congress, realizing it needs to deal with the ballooning budget problems, will need to pass a lean budget for science in order to fund things like welfare. Only NASA will be largely spared since it is so spread-out over many Congressional districts.

There is no hope for science funding in the emergency stimulus bill and only a little hope for a April/May supplemental appropriations bill tacked onto war spending. So there will be a long time at 2008 levels of funding and then cuts and basically level funding for the rest in the eventual 2009 budget passed by Congress and signed by the then president.

Don't believe me, read what the Director of Fermilab thinks:

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2008/today08-02-05.html

The only real hope for science funding is through universities really. If you know any university trustees, let them know about the problems. If these wealthy and well connected people feel that their companies are at risk due to the US trailing in science, then they can make an impact with Representative and Senators. We need more people like Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel, expressing why science funding is key.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/20/EDFDUHP1I.DTL

Liquid helium is used extensively in scientific research. Specifically, it is used to keep the Tevatron over at Fermilab nice and cool.

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

As i type this, we're shooting protons out of our LINaC at a neutron generatng target (beryllium i think) and treating some person. Many years now.

From Fermilinux FAQ

Q. What is Fermi Linux LTS?
A. Fermi Linux LTS (Long Term Support) is in essence RedHat Enterprise, recompiled.

Though now it is based on Scientific Linux distribution.

Stephen Baxter's novel Space uses this idea.

PS, your link is malformed. Should be An Astrophysical Explanation for the Great Silence, very interesting despite being a PS file with the ugly bitmapped TeX font.

Sorry I should have included this in the original comment. Here is a link to the original expected Tevatron sensitivity and the updated one. The y axis is the volume of data collected by both experiments i.e. sum of DØ and CDF datasets and the x axis is the mass of the Standard Model Higgs. This is currently limited to be above 114 GeV/c2. The three lines are 5-sigma discovery, 3-sigma evidence and 95% confidence limit if we don't see any Higgs event in that amount of data.

The dip round 160 GeV/c2 mass is because a heavy enough Higgs can decay differently than a lighter one and the different decay is a lot easier to detect above all the other "background" events happening in the detector. We should get 10-20 fb-1 between both experiments by 2009 so, as you can see, unless we do something clever (which had not been thought of at the time the plots were made) or the Higgs is really light we won't get 5-sigma, but 3-sigma is a real possibility.

you joke but thats pretty much what you do when you want to minimise cosmic ray interference. To be honest your second best bet due to the natural radioactivity you mention is the stick it in a tunnel under a moutain .

Seriously its actually really surprising how many cosmic rays are hitting you right now. They are also extremely penetrating, often being muons (by the time they reach us). Basically its already got through 120km of atmosphere which although isnt that dense, it sure is thick so you're going to need a lot of shielding. And in 5 minutes at least one has hit you. Over 30 years that builds up. To really drive it home, it you are ever never CERN, stop in and see their microcosmin, look at the cosmic ray detector there and be amazed at how often it goes off.

It's too bad the US isn't building a National Ignition Facility to produce fusion in the laboratory using the largest lasers on the planet.

If only there were physicists scrutinizing the data produced by something like Gravity Probe B here in the US.

Something like a Z Machine would be really useful for high energy physics, but the fundies in the US won't allow it.

Then there is NASA, sitting its laurels of times long past, not making any effort to replace [1] the ill-conceived shuttle.

The US isn't attempting to measure the rate of polar ice cap melting using precise measurements of the exact center of mass of the entire planet. No, because physics in the US sucks and that sort of work is best left to others.

If the NSF wasn't completely dominated by neo-cons it might have funded Kip Thorne and let him build the most sensitive laser interferometer on Earth.

There aren't a dozen people orbiting the planet attempting to assemble the largest space based solar collector in history; the physics involved are far beyond anything practiced in the US. I can just imagine Americans in space, risking life and limb. They'd probably find themselves using staple guns to keep from getting killed on live TV. The US is too cowardly for any of that.

If Europe had only had the wisdom to exclude the US from LHC, Fermilab's mistakes wouldn't have led to their current magnet problems. There's the US again, setting back physics by another decade.

Then there are the beef-eaters in Detroit, oblivious to any concept that doesn't involve guzzling gas.

Those damn Christens did manage to stifle US fusion research; the next big Tokamak is being built in France for crying-out-loud. There's hardly even any US funding involved.

That article is right. The US is nothing but a swill of gun-toting suburbanite consumers, polluting and terrorizing the world.

[1] Watch the quarterly report video on the right panel; bunch of silly US bubba cowboys trying to engineer a rocket. What a laugh.

The person who coined "God particle" won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, and is a director at Fermilab.

What the fuck have you accomplished, asshole?

Here you go: http://ed.fnal.gov/samplers/hsphys/people/lederman .html

Tell the man yourself you don't approve of his terminology.

And "holy grail" has become a generic term. You shouldn't criticize language if you are so woefully pig ignornat. LOL! What an idiot!

Go to the MiniBooNE web site and guess whether the photomultiplier tubes used to detect the event are either 1520 or 1280.
This could explain an error. At least in their web site, as the correct answer is 42, as everyone knows!

For those interested in the engineering details, you can read some of the original design papers here:

LHC Interaction Region Quadrupole Cryostat Design and Fabrication
http://tdserver1.fnal.gov/nicol/lhc_irq_cryostat/c h_darve/public/publi/MT-17.pdf

And some viewgraphs of the relevant "spyder" supports in cross-section here:

Conceptual Design Review slides:
http://tdpc02.fnal.gov/nicol/lhc_irq_cryostat/cdr/ cdr_viewgraphs/sld009.htm

And some details on strength measurement and alignment procedures:

Alignment and Strength Measurements of the LHC Interaction Region Quadrupole Magnets
http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/2006/conf/fermilab-con f-06-303-td.pdf

For those that want to see what this stuff looks like in pictures:

(US-DOE LHC Progress Report 1QFY02)
http://www.ch.doe.gov/offices/FAO/projects/uslhc/p ictures/acc1picqtr02.pdf

For those interested in the engineering details, you can read some of the original design papers here:

LHC Interaction Region Quadrupole Cryostat Design and Fabrication
http://tdserver1.fnal.gov/nicol/lhc_irq_cryostat/c h_darve/public/publi/MT-17.pdf

And some viewgraphs of the relevant "spyder" supports in cross-section here:

Conceptual Design Review slides:
http://tdpc02.fnal.gov/nicol/lhc_irq_cryostat/cdr/ cdr_viewgraphs/sld009.htm

And some details on strength measurement and alignment procedures:

Alignment and Strength Measurements of the LHC Interaction Region Quadrupole Magnets
http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/2006/conf/fermilab-con f-06-303-td.pdf

For those that want to see what this stuff looks like in pictures:

(US-DOE LHC Progress Report 1QFY02)
http://www.ch.doe.gov/offices/FAO/projects/uslhc/p ictures/acc1picqtr02.pdf

For those interested in the engineering details, you can read some of the original design papers here:

LHC Interaction Region Quadrupole Cryostat Design and Fabrication
http://tdserver1.fnal.gov/nicol/lhc_irq_cryostat/c h_darve/public/publi/MT-17.pdf

And some viewgraphs of the relevant "spyder" supports in cross-section here:

Conceptual Design Review slides:
http://tdpc02.fnal.gov/nicol/lhc_irq_cryostat/cdr/ cdr_viewgraphs/sld009.htm

And some details on strength measurement and alignment procedures:

Alignment and Strength Measurements of the LHC Interaction Region Quadrupole Magnets
http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/2006/conf/fermilab-con f-06-303-td.pdf

For those that want to see what this stuff looks like in pictures:

(US-DOE LHC Progress Report 1QFY02)
http://www.ch.doe.gov/offices/FAO/projects/uslhc/p ictures/acc1picqtr02.pdf

Today: NPR reports on LHC progress In late February, National Public Radio reporter (and former Fermilab Public Affairs intern) David Kestenbaum visited CERN and took a tour of the LHC. NPR will broadcast his report on All Things Considered this afternoon. You can catch the program on WBEZ 91.5 FM between 3:00 and 6:30 p.m. Fermilab Todaywill publish a link to the audio on Tuesday.

Unfortunately, the US also has "egg on their face" from other goings-on in particle physics. Another fairly recent disaster was the cancellation of BTeV. This was most unfortunate because European collaborators were completely disenfranchised. By not having a system in place that can effectively fund a multi-year research project, we've lost valuable collaborators and lost international credibility. In addition to this, we've lost enormous amounts of funding for particle physics over the past decade, and as of now there are no major new experiments being built in the US, and everything that's running will pretty much shut down by 2008 (Fermilab, SLAC, Brookhaven, CESR/CLEO). All Fermilab has going for it after 2008 is that they can build magnets, and now with these issues maybe even that is suspect. As particle physics tends to thrive only on relatively large experiments that take well over a decade to go from proposal to construction and finally operation, it's hard to imagine that basic science in the US will even be relevant any more to the worldwide community for at least the next few decades, if ever again. What's just as frustrating as this was the complete lack of media coverage as the US accomplished its "exit strategy" in particle physics, beginning in about 1993 and ending just about now.

Another statement from Fermilab.

Last Tuesday we took a pratfall on the world stage: the high pressure test of the Fermilab-built inner triplet failed dramatically in the LHC tunnel with a loud "bang" and a cloud of dust. It was the first time that the three magnets together with the associated interface box (DFBX) that supplies them with the cryogenic and electrical connections had been tested as an assembly. The high pressure test simulated conditions that can occur in a quench of an LHC sector. Teams at CERN and Fermilab have quickly determined the reason for the failure and are in the process of designing a solution to the problem. (See the article in this issue of Fermilab Today.)

What the analysis shows so far is that something extraordinarily simple was missed in the design: the obvious imbalance of axial forces that can occur under the conditions represented by the test or by a quench in the LHC. We do many very complex engineering projects successfully that require sophisticated engineering skills and advanced computing tools. We test the complex features we design thoroughly. In this case we are dumbfounded that we missed some very simple balance of forces. Not only was it missed in the engineering design but also in the four engineering reviews carried out between 1998 and 2002 before launching the construction of the magnets. Furthermore even though every magnet was thoroughly tested individually, they were never tested with the exact configuration that they would have when installed at CERN--thus missing the opportunity to discover the problem sooner.

It is very important for our institution that while we are on the world stage we also demonstrate how we deal with adversity. We have given the top priority in our laboratory to helping CERN fix the problem; we will do everything that is necessary to minimize the impact to the LHC schedule. We also appreciate the offers of assistance that we have received from our partner laboratories KEK, BNL, LBNL and ANL.

Beyond the immediate fix we must reflect on how we got into this mess. To have the benefit of independent eyes we will have an external review of the events that transpired from the beginning of the design. We need and want to make sure that we find the root causes of the problem and from the lessons learned build a stronger institution. Beyond that, there is no substitute for the commitment each of us makes to excellence, to critical thinking and to sweating every detail.

- Pier Oddone

like this or like this or like this or with this if you want to go low tech (light has no charge and is smaller than a proton).

Okay sorry for the flippant answer, basically in particle physics, protons are huge, very large (but not massive) objects. Finding something smaller than them is pretty easy because size doesnt matter. What matters is the strength of its interaction with the rest of the universe. So we find small objects via their interactions with other objects which we can detect in our detectors. No charge makes things a little more tricky but objects can also carry colour charge and weak isospin and thats how we would find an electrically neutral object. Neutrinos, the hardest particles to detector only interact via the weak force and they are almost impossible to see but we do detect them. Also we can detect things like neutrinos by the absence of things, they carry away energy from the collision and we can detect that theres not all the energy there should be.

They are accelerated to between 40% and 99% of the Speed of light, or between 100Million electron Volts to 10GeV

10 GeV is nothing for a cosmic ray. The KASCADE experiment measured cosmic rays of up to 10^9 GeV (10^18 eV) years ago, and the Auger experiment will measure cosmic rays of 10^20 eV.

(For reference: the most powerful particle accelerator is currently the Tevatron at Fermilab at 2 TeV.)

Neutrinos carry no electrical charge. Movements of uncharged particles (whether or not they have mass) are unaffected by magnetic fields. Therefore, the customary excuse of hidden "strange magnetic fields that lurk beneath the Sun's surface" cannot be invoked to explain away this correlation between neutrino flux and sunspot number. Quantitative determination of the existence of a correlation between neutrino flux and sunspot number or solar wind intensity would falsify the fusion model once and for all.

For the sake of your own arguments about String Theory, none of this apparently introduces any proble

Scientific Linux is maintained by folks at Fermilab.

Scientific Linux is maintained by folks at Fermilab.

So is Fermi the second largest?

We need to bend the particles path so we can measure its momentum. A charged particle in an magnetic field will have a radius of curvature inversely proportional to the magnetic field and proportional to its momentum, with opposite charged particles curving in different ways. The radius of curvature decreases as the magnetic field increases and increases as the momentum of the particle increases. So for very high momentum particles, the radius of curvature is very large so the particle travels in almost a straight line which makes it very difficult to measure the radius of curvature. Hence you increase the magnetic field to force the particle to "bend" more and make it easier to measure the amount of "bending". So you want as big as magnetic field as possible and at the moment superconducting magnets give the most powerfull fields.

Here, have a look at this picture of a particle physics event (not from ATLAS but CDF at the Tevatron but the idea is the same). Lines in the circle are particle tracks, the two pink ones are very high momentum charged particles (in this case electrons). Notice how they are straight. As such we dont have a very good measurement of their momentum. The other grey lines are low momentum particles as they bend a lot since the radius of curvature is small.

Why do we want to measure the momentum of a particle? Well the Higgs boson (if it exists) will decay to 4 muons (basically heavy electrons) (nb: the Higgs can decay to other stuff but for a heavy higgs this is the cleanest signature and will be how its discovered). You want to measure the momentum of these muons and from that you can measure the mass of the particle that produced them. If you get a lot of events at a certain mass above what you expect from background, you've just discovered a new particle, likely to be the Higgs.

The Fermilab Spires database lists over 50 titles, including:
The discovery of anti-matter : the autobiography of Carl David Anderson, the youngest man to win the Nobel prize
Cockcroft and the atom
Atoms in the family My life with Enrico Fermi (by Laura Fermi)
Strong force : the story of physicist Shirley Ann Jackson
Living with nuclei : 50 years in the nuclear age, memoirs of a Japanese physicist
Lawrence and his laboratory : a history of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Schrèodinger, life and thought
The day after Trinity : J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb
Strange beauty : Murray Gell-Mann and the revolution in twentieth-century physics
and of course the obligatory dozen or so books about Einstein, Feynmann, etc.

I saw this guy lecture at Fermilab two years ago... it was sort of the buzz around the office, and I don't think he was greeted very warmly. Some of the talk was above my head (being a lowly undergrad at the time) but I do very distinctly recall a few instances where physicists stood up, asked a question, and then walked out before the question was completely answered.

Still interesting stuff... mayhaps I'll [http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures /Colloquium/040714Taleyarkhan/index.htm] go back and watch it again.

Here are the slides and video from the talk. It was one of the good ones.

I'm a student in high energy physics and the sysadmin for our machines. Our entire research group at my university uses Linux exclusively for our servers and our desktops, aside from my advisor who's in love with Apple. When Linux newbies join our group, within a few months they've decided to install it on their laptops because for what we do, it's clearly superior.

Linux is no longer simply the domain of CS students and hobbyists. Anyone who suggests otherwise is avoiding the truth. It may not be ready for "mainstream" desktop use, but for specialists in many fields, it's the best choice. I can't imagine trying to do my work on a Windows box; we use Linux because it's free, it's powerful, and it works. There's also usually a hobbyist in groups like ours who can admin the machines, and in my experience, a Linux cluster takes a lot less work to keep running than a bunch of Windows machines.

Fermilab even hosts its own distribution called Fermi Linux. It's Red Hat Enterprise with some changes, essentially.

In my opinion, Linux doesn't have to overtake MS or Apple to accomplish something in the world. Market share is silly to talk about with free software because the word "market" means something completely different. I don't care if Joe User runs Linux; I just care that I can. Joe User can't contribute anything back, so he's really almost irrelevant from a point of view that ignores marketspeak. If I can run Linux myself, then so can others, and there are enough like-minded people in the world who will help me write software for it and give it away for free. Therefore, if Linux so much as exists, it has accomplished quite a bit.

The US is helping quite a bit with the LHC, in addition to many other non-European countries. I'm not sure how you came up with the 20-year European lead on particle physics (maybe you pulled it out of your ass), but as with any other research facility I'm sure there will be plenty of US scientists making progress there. How many European scientists do you think are working with NASA on the Mars rover data? Quite a few. The US is already putting billions behind the LHC, doesn't seem obvious that US scientists would contribute significantly to LHC research once it's fully built? Major research is largely an international affair today; most mature scientists put patriotism aside (unless you think Harvard's being pro-Bush by researching with stem cells).

"Europe and Japan are doing advanced medical research" - such as? And the US isn't? Stem cells aren't the last word in medical science. The US stem cell situation sucks to be honest, but that's not enough to pass judgment on any nation's medical progress. I wouldn't be surprised if the 2008 presidential election changed things dramatically, possibly moreso than the 2004 election did. Why couldn't it?

Yes, the Hubble is dead. That's why there are multiple replacemetns being proposed. I'm intrigued by your claim that NASA's abandoning manned space travel; I suppose this whole Project Constellation business is a great hoax, and that Lockheed and Boeing are in on it too. Yes, the US wants to militarize space, but they're doing a lot more too. And the Taikonauts are a joke compared to the routine ISS missions by NASA.

Seriously, if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, just shut up.

It is not common knowledge, and stats mean more than quoting a wikipedia article(which doesn't state postgres performs better, it states performance is "comparable"). My understanding of the "common knowledge" is that mysql offers better performance, postgres has better sql standard compliance and more features. Common knowledge would dictate that more features would slow down performance. For instance, extra data integrity checks every time inserts, updates or deletes are performed would be an extra feature, but it would come at the expense of speed.

You are just propagating myths - how about real comparisons of performance, like these?

http://monstera.man.poznan.pl/wiki/index.php/Mysql _vs_postgres (mysql tested faster)

http://www-css.fnal.gov/dsg/external/freeware/pgsq l-vs-mysql.html (mysql tested faster)

http://www-css.fnal.gov/dsg/external/freeware/mysq l-vs-pgsql.html

In an effort to verify the Japanese Super-K (Super-Kamiokande) experiment's conclusion that neutrinos have mass Fermilab's MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) experiment will attempt to find oscillations in neutrino flavors (muon, electron, & tau). Such oscillations would be definitive proof that neutrinos have mass. NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) is the Fermilab project that is responsible for providing the beam of muon neutrinos to be used by the MINOS experiment.

A beam of 120 GeV protons will be extracted from Fermilab's "Main Injector" where it will pass through a target hall. In the target hall the beam of protons will collide with a Carbon Target producing a scatter of charged pions and kaons. An electromagnetic horn will re-culminate this beam and a second horn will focus the energy of this beam, which will then pass through a decay pipe where the pion/kaon beam will decay into muons and muon neutrinos. The beam will then pass through an absorber and about 50 ft of rock that will remove unwanted particles still in the beam such as the muons. This leaves a beam of pure muon neutrinos to pass through the MINOS near detector, which will verify the composition of the beam. The beam then passes underground 730 km to the MINOS far detector located half a mile underground in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, which will again look at the composition of the beam.
The data at the far detector will be compared to the data at the near detector, and if electron or tau neutrinos are found in the beam at the MINOS far detector then two things will happen. First there will be a large celebration at Fermilab, and second the NuMI target hall will be reconfigured to deliver a different energy level focus by moving the second horn into a different position along the beam-line. The MINOS experiment will then go on to try to answer other important neutrino questions such as what is the difference in the square of the masses of the oscillating neutrinos ("delta mass squared").

In an effort to verify the Japanese Super-K (Super-Kamiokande) experiment's conclusion that neutrinos have mass Fermilab's MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) experiment will attempt to find oscillations in neutrino flavors (muon, electron, & tau). Such oscillations would be definitive proof that neutrinos have mass. NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) is the Fermilab project that is responsible for providing the beam of muon neutrinos to be used by the MINOS experiment.

A beam of 120 GeV protons will be extracted from Fermilab's "Main Injector" where it will pass through a target hall. In the target hall the beam of protons will collide with a Carbon Target producing a scatter of charged pions and kaons. An electromagnetic horn will re-culminate this beam and a second horn will focus the energy of this beam, which will then pass through a decay pipe where the pion/kaon beam will decay into muons and muon neutrinos. The beam will then pass through an absorber and about 50 ft of rock that will remove unwanted particles still in the beam such as the muons. This leaves a beam of pure muon neutrinos to pass through the MINOS near detector, which will verify the composition of the beam. The beam then passes underground 730 km to the MINOS far detector located half a mile underground in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, which will again look at the composition of the beam.
The data at the far detector will be compared to the data at the near detector, and if electron or tau neutrinos are found in the beam at the MINOS far detector then two things will happen. First there will be a large celebration at Fermilab, and second the NuMI target hall will be reconfigured to deliver a different energy level focus by moving the second horn into a different position along the beam-line. The MINOS experiment will then go on to try to answer other important neutrino questions such as what is the difference in the square of the masses of the oscillating neutrinos ("delta mass squared").

They have two detectors. One very near to the source, one very far away. The near source measures many more hits than the far source does. Thus, they know they're being produced in larger quantities than they're being received in. Compared to a model of the test configuration assuming no oscillation, there are about 33% too few hits on the far detector as compared to the near. This amounts to a 4 or 5 sigma detection of the missing neutrinos (in other words, there is approximtely a 0.7%-1.8% chance that this is due to a statistical coincidence). It's typically at 2 or 3 sigma that you start making a confident announcement of a discovery, so a 4 or 5 sigma confirmation of an already reported result is very, very strong evidence.

They don't yet have enough data to rule out some alternative explanations. At this point, though, neutrino oscillation (and mass) would really be the simplest, least "out there" explanation. These experimenters would like nothing more than to find that even the oscillation theories don't explain the data. That would open a whole new field of inquiry and possibly lead to Nobel Prizes.

If you're techincally inclined, read about the Minos results straight from the horses' mouths.

The seminar talks go into a fair bit of detail about their data analysis, which included "blind analysis." In other words, they kept a significant (and unknown until the end) fraction of their data secret from those doing the analysis. Using the other fraction, they went through their testing procedures -- figuring out how to detect false events, how to deal with various , etc -- using a limited piece of the data. Once they were confident that they had done everything correctly, they opened the whole data set and ran their procedure without changing it.

This protected them from tainting their data by, e.g., throwing out data points that didn't match expectations. That is a common problem, even among good scientists. It's very easy to subconsciously make decisions that bias your results toward the expected answer.

Anyway, I am a physicist, and I think you should believe these guys. Everything I've seen indicates they've done a good, careful job with the experiment.

The FermiLab press release speaks about this new experiment being much more precise in measuring the number of Neutrinos and the energies expended in their oscillations.

They also refer to the earlier experiments, "Our first result corroborates earlier observations of muon neutrino disappearance, made by the Japanese Super-Kamiokande and K2K experiments. Over the next few years, we will collect about fifteen times more data, yielding more results with higher precision, paving the way to better understanding this phenomenon. Our current results already rival the Super-Kamiokande and K2K results in precision."
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/m inos_3-30-06.html

I joined the experiment in 1995 soon after the collaboration came together and created the proposal. In that time I've written simulation ("Monte Carlo"), reconstruction and framework code for the experiment. It's been a pretty exciting 10 years. The push to get everything together this last month has been exhausting. But after presenting the results on Thursday do we physicists take a well deserved break and party like 1999? Well, noooo. We spend Friday, Saturday and Sunday IN MEETINGS! Today (Saturday) we were there from 8:30am to 7:00pm discussing how further to proceed. We've got 50% more data "in the can" that we didn't yet present (cross checks to perform, fits to perform). Plus plans for more data taking after the accelerator comes up again in June. Plus other physics results we're still trying to extract. Plus more improved simulations to do in order to yield improved limits. Such is the life of a physicist.

I joined the experiment in 1995 soon after the collaboration came together and created the proposal. In that time I've written simulation ("Monte Carlo"), reconstruction and framework code for the experiment. It's been a pretty exciting 10 years. The push to get everything together this last month has been exhausting. But after presenting the results on Thursday do we physicists take a well deserved break and party like 1999? Well, noooo. We spend Friday, Saturday and Sunday IN MEETINGS! Today (Saturday) we were there from 8:30am to 7:00pm discussing how further to proceed. We've got 50% more data "in the can" that we didn't yet present (cross checks to perform, fits to perform). Plus plans for more data taking after the accelerator comes up again in June. Plus other physics results we're still trying to extract. Plus more improved simulations to do in order to yield improved limits. Such is the life of a physicist.

"In particle physics there is the Standard Model which describes how the fundamental building blocks of matter behave and interact with each other," explained Dr Falk Harris.

"And this model tells us that neutrinos should have no mass. So the fact that we have now got independent measurements of neutrinos saying that they must have mass, means that this Standard Model is going to have be revised or superseded by something else."

The average person in this country couldn't even begin to tell you what ... scientists do.

A great illustration of this (literally) is drawings of scientists by seventh graders. Two sets of drawings were made, one before the kids went on a field trip to the Fermilab physics center, and one afterwards. The differences are stark.

The electrons inside a CRT are around 350,000,000 Kelvin just before they hit the screen. Which sounds all insane but it's only 30KeV. High energy partial physics is into the Gev range http://www.fnal.gov/pub/ferminews/ferminews03-11-0 1/p4.html is pushing 800 GeV which works out to ~8.8 * 10^15 or 8,800,000,000,000,000 Kelvin. But temperature is only part of the issue density is also important.

Most systems working in this energy range only have a tiny number of particles with this energy. Think of it like taking all the energy in a cup of hot coffee and dumping it into a tiny fraction of a drop. Yea that drop is really hot but when you put that back in a cup it's only going to heat things up to normal hot coffee temperatures.

This is an interesting interpretation of simple arithmatic truths...

I'm generally interested in this sort of thing, having watched the US suffer the Arab Oil Embargo from Munich, and comparing the two countries' response. Got me interested in energy-related stuff ... ~33 years ago.

You are of course correct that virtually anyone in America has a profoundly larger energy footprint than a mud hut living goat herder in the African outback. I'm not sure how you you think that's a rhetorical scoring point in the context of choices available to the American consumer, but ... your keen grasp of the obvious is an inspiration to us all.

I've done the math for my life.

  I know, because i track with daily logging and simple stats, that the choices i make result in a lower energy use than they would be if i followed the Ameican standard modality. I cyclecommuted http://tomato.fnal.gov/bicycle/usersInfo.php?order =2005 202 days last year, did not use a car at all 205 days, drove my car (which goes 3~4X further/gallon than your hummer) less than 5K mi, had summer electric bills 0.5X and winter gas bills 0.6X the avg. of the area ... My curbside waste stream is about 1/5 of my neighborhood avg. My recreational toys are either pedal or paddle powered, and they're all ridden or hand-towed to where i use them. I use a push-powered reel mower.

My energy consumption and resource footprint is just about as low as i can make it, short of living only on rice and dried beans and drinking my own urine.

  i'm pretty sure my energy footprint is lower than yours, and yes, i go to some level of inconvenience to achieve it, since i ride pretty much year round, in all weather, on a rotating shift. There are absolutely times when it would be easier to take my car.

So i pretty much earned right to bitchslap you and your tranny hooker tonka toy. Let's see some numeric analysis from you instead of a bunch of Hannity-esque moral equivication. In the meantime, you should probably thank me (feel free to pick a cheek to kiss) for making available an extra couple hundred gallons of gas for you.

How much gasoline did you piss away this week?

And if you're really discerning, you'll be able to intuit how i personally save the American taxpayer 1~3 million dollars each year in electricity. Not because i have to, but because i want to and i can.

So you can kiss me on the other cheek for saving a little extra uranium for you to post with.

Hmmm... The radioactivity generally does not pose a serious problem... I think that when we do cause parts of the detector to become radioactive (eg by beam scraping) that it dissipates fairly quickly. It is intense while it lasts, but brief. However, I am not an expert on this. Also, it is generally not too difficult, at least in the tracking chambers, to tell whether a particle originated at the collision vertex or somewhere else. Now, in the calorimeters and the muon chambers, you could get spurious bits of energy deposited and not know whether it was from cosmic rays, local radioactivity, or interesting particles.

The tevatron gets shut down quite often. We had a long (2-week or so) shutdown a couple of weeks ago. Some o-ring seal got old and leaked, and so an access had to be made to repair it. Thing is, large parts of the tevatron are kept at liquid helium temp (for superconductivity) during running, and so warming the thing up and then later cooling it back down are often the longest parts of a shutdown.

And of course, the tevatron and supporting accelerators go through a regular cycle of building up a store of protons and antiprotons, and then using them until the luminosity gets too low to be worthwhile to keep running it. Then, we kick that bunch of ps and pbars off (basically redirect them into a large chunk of metal, I believe) (this is called a quench), and start a new store.

You can look at this page: http://www-bd.fnal.gov/notifyservlet/www?project=o utside for live information, or at this page: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/news06/update.html for a log of recent activity.

Hmmm... The radioactivity generally does not pose a serious problem... I think that when we do cause parts of the detector to become radioactive (eg by beam scraping) that it dissipates fairly quickly. It is intense while it lasts, but brief. However, I am not an expert on this. Also, it is generally not too difficult, at least in the tracking chambers, to tell whether a particle originated at the collision vertex or somewhere else. Now, in the calorimeters and the muon chambers, you could get spurious bits of energy deposited and not know whether it was from cosmic rays, local radioactivity, or interesting particles.

The tevatron gets shut down quite often. We had a long (2-week or so) shutdown a couple of weeks ago. Some o-ring seal got old and leaked, and so an access had to be made to repair it. Thing is, large parts of the tevatron are kept at liquid helium temp (for superconductivity) during running, and so warming the thing up and then later cooling it back down are often the longest parts of a shutdown.

And of course, the tevatron and supporting accelerators go through a regular cycle of building up a store of protons and antiprotons, and then using them until the luminosity gets too low to be worthwhile to keep running it. Then, we kick that bunch of ps and pbars off (basically redirect them into a large chunk of metal, I believe) (this is called a quench), and start a new store.

You can look at this page: http://www-bd.fnal.gov/notifyservlet/www?project=o utside for live information, or at this page: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/news06/update.html for a log of recent activity.

well...some people do. :D You can easily make the live feed of CDF and D0 from fermilab's tevatron into a simple screensaver. In fact, I rather like mine. :) Sometimes they shut down the feed and just keep cycling the last few frames but that's ok.