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Years After Shutting Down, Tevatron Reveals Properties of Higgs Boson
sciencehabit writes: A U.S. atom smasher has made an important scientific contribution 3.5 years after it shut down. Scientists are reporting that the Tevatron collider in Batavia, Illinois, has provided new details about the nature of the famed Higgs boson — the particle that's key to physicists' explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass and the piece in a theory called the standard model. The new result bolsters the case that the Higgs, which was discovered at a different atom smasher, exactly fits the standard model predictions.
My wife is a staff physicist at Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. They collected so many exabytes of data from the Tevatron before it was shut down and superseded by the LHC at Cern, that physicists will be spending many more years analyzing the data. Many PhD theses and major discoveries will likely come out of that mass of data. The work that is going on at Fermi now will likely be similarly important. I can only think of one other neutrino experiment that can duplicate (maybe) what they are doing at FermiLab now. For more really interesting information about what they are doing there, go to www.fnal.gov.
Scientific setbacks is what allow us to advance scientifically.
The submitter funnily avoids naming the largest and most complex instrument ever built by man, the European Large Hadron Collider, by casually downplaying and referring to it as "a different atom smasher". Methinks the submitter is an envious American.
While EU countries contributed the bulk of the resources, personnel, and location of course, the US also contributed over half a billion dollars of the estimated $6.4 billion (€4.6 billion) total cost, technical and scientific contributions, and more than a few personnel. It was and still is a massive international effort, with scientists and engineers from 100 different countries contributing.
As a US citizen, I was actually quite proud of *humanity* for creating such an amazing device, all for the purpose of advancing our scientific understanding. What's there to be envious of? I think it's fantastic. No one but you seems intent on turning it into an international pissing match.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.