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Tevatron Has Come To the End of Its Run
Med-trump writes "The U.S. government's Chicago-area Fermilab has been at the forefront of high-energy physics. That's in large part thanks to the Tevatron, the machine that first reached the energies needed to discover the last quark in the Standard Model. But the Tevatron has come to the end of its run; at 2pm on Friday, it will be shut down for the last time."
not all of Fermilab is shutting down, just the Tevatron - they can still make a neutrino beam. Just like at CERN, the neutrinos aren't generated by the LHC.
Weird Stuff and hamfests.
"Whatcha want for this 5 volt, 2,000 amp power supply?"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Just looking at the old data will prove nothing from the old MINOS experiment because it suggests that CERN did it right with the OPERA experiment. The problem before is the margin of error on the MINOS test is far too high causing the measured speed to be faster then the speed of light with a margin of error overlapping the speed of light. They need to do a slight upgrade and redo the tests to get the Margin of Error down.
The lab isn't going anywhere. While a few groups are justifiably concerned about their jobs, the overall mood around the lab is optimism. New projects are underway, accelerator research is ongoing, and proposals for new experiments are always in the works.
There's plenty of work left to be done. The real concern going forward is keeping the government willing to spend money on it.
No. As others said, the Tevatron is just the last stage of a chain of accelerators, one that was used (nowadays) just to collide high energy protons and antiprotons and "see what's inside". The neutrinos come from the previous stage (called "Main Injector"): they used to take a few protons off the beam, collide them into a target in a very well defined direction, focus the muons that come from this, get neutrinos from the muon decay and measure them near the detector and in Minnesota, to get an idea of their oscillation (and now, also of their speed). The experiment that does this is called MINOS, and it doesn't depend on the Tevatron at all. Actually, shutting down the Tevatron will help MINOS: they will get more protons, therefore more neutrinos and more data.
By the way, this is exacly the same general arrangement used by the OPERA experiment (the one with FTL neutrinos), where the neutrinos are produced in CERN and measured there and in Gran Sasso.
Why do you think you need to be #1 in everything? Yeah, I know I'm going to be modded down as flamebait, probably rightly so, but still this needs to be said.
What makes you think you even can be #1 in everything? Now I realize you Americans tend to see yourselves as #1 in everything, or that's how it looks to the rest of the world, expect the few hot topics of the day where you grudgingly admit falling to "#2 place" (probably because you think it as "#1: Rest of the world; #2: America" so there is no third place) and which nobody remembers a week from now.
Seriously. You cannot compete and win in everything. You choose your specialty and excel in that. Then you spin that as the most important thing in the world so you can feed your overly nationalistic prides. That's what it looks like to the rest of the world. But even then you sometimes you have to make strategic changes to your areas of focus.
No, it's not like most other countries don't do that kind of chutzpah, but there's a difference in degree. It seems to have a strong correlation to all kind of flag-waving and pledges to the flag in classrooms. That too happens mainly 1) in African banana republics and 2) the USA. And the rest of the developed world cares more about case #2 because we have more dealings with you. Please, please grow up and realize that the world doesn't revolve around you. You cannot be #1 in everything. You are not that great and that much above everybody else, and that kind of arrogance only serves to annoy the rest of the civilized world.