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World's Largest Atom Smasher Nears Completion

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the dark-matter-cannot-hide dept.

evanwired writes "The last magnet was put in place this week at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. When the device is completed about a year from now it will be the world's largest particle accelerator, putting scientists in reach of new data and possible answers to questions dominated by theory over observation for the past two decades. Wired News recently visited the installation — awe-inspiring in its scale — as part of an in-depth, three-part series on the collider exploring the engineering, science and politics of high-end theoretical physics in the 21st century."

2 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. In the mean time.... by stox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    HEP research in the United States is grinding to a halt. The DOE has nothing on the board for Fermilab, SLAC, etc. past 2010. While I admire and respect the work the Europeans are doing ( with little help from the US ), I am deeply concerned that this nation is losing its way. Basic R&D is the foundation that made the US what it was in the 20th century. We are doing less and less of it everyday. Unless the Clowns^H^H^H^H^HEsteemed politicians in Washington wake up soon, the US will soon become a second rate nation.

    --
    "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
    1. Re:In the mean time.... by Markus+Registrada · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If high-energy-physicists had any questions they wanted answers to, there might be more reason to invest in expensive toys for them. As it happens, they all seem tied up doing string theory, which (notoriously) offers no predictions to test.

      In the meantime, condensed-matter physicists, fluid-dynamic physicists, and plasma physicists (not to mention meteorologists, metabolic geneticists, and what-have-you) have never swung the kind of budgets you get, evidently, from having made an atom bomb once, despite that each group have collectively produced far more positive and far fewer negative effects on our daily lives.

      (No, I'm not in any of those groups.)

      Astronomers sometimes do swing big budgets, but they deliver astonishingly pretty pictures of stuff that really is out there -- however much they prefer to talk about stuff that's not in the pictures. Long after they've all changed their minds about the latter, we'll still have the pictures.

      Speaking personally (and at deep risk of spiteful moderation) I wouldn't mind a century-long hiatus in particle-accelerator funding. There's plenty of science to be done by regular grad students at regular workbenches, and to much greater (perhaps even beneficial!) effect.