What????
Lester didn't get to give an alliterative rundown of events in the latest proton billiards experiment?
Shame on you El Reg.
CERN boffins have finally hit paydirt with the Large Hadron Collider, finding a particle that is pretty much almost certainly the long sought-after Higgs boson. CMS event showing characteristics expected from the decay of the Higgs boson LOOK - THERE IT IS! IN THERE SOMEWHERE! Where before numerous findings of "strong …
"IF THEY WOULD HAVE BUILT THE BIG PRATICLE ACCELERATOR IN AMERICA OUR SCIENTISTS WOULD HAVE FIGURED THIS CRAP OUT A LONG TIME AGO..."
But the US did not. It started building the SSC, Superconducting Super Collider in Texas and it was supposed to be even bigger than the LHC, but it got cold feet and cancelled it about 1993--now all there is to show for it is a damn big hole in the ground.
Reckon that was the turning point for the US, it's been downhill ever since. Too lousy to afford science anymore, lost interest in teaching science to kids, bugger-all funding for NASA, off-shoring of US industry to China and so on, and so on.
Instead, the US prefers wars and invading countries, annoying the world community, tying up world trade in its favour, fucking up the copyright and patent system to the disadvantage of ordinary people, suing mothers and kids for copyright violation, violating international law (UN's resolutions on the US over Cuba etc.), diplomatic sleazebag tactics a la WikiLeaks and prosecuting/attempting to prosecute citizens of other countries who commit acts outside US jurisdiction which the US doesn't like.
Over the last 30 years, the US has morphed from a progressive scientific and technological society, to a backward, conservative bully-boy who doesn't play by the rules.
According to the episode of QI I watched last night the US has the solid support* of Palau on the Cuba thing so it's not like it's an international pariah or anything. . .
*At least until the aid money runs out and the way things are going it'll probably run out soon. Twenty years ago the US thought it had won the Cold War. Twenty years on it's becoming clear that it was just that the USSR lost it first.
Poor Graham,
Had you paid attention to the news, the guys at Fermilab had discovered more evidence from the data they collected years earlier.
The SSC was halted for a couple of reasons. While I forget the list of reasons, the major one was cost. Considering that it took the entire EU, including the US to fund CERN, having the US go it alone, let alone any country, would have been cost prohibitive.
If it wasn't for the research done at Fermilab, then it would still take some more time for the boffin's at CERN to find it.
Please don't let the facts get in the way of a good rant.
While you may not care much for US politics, need I remind you that much of the US's foreign policy is based on events starting back at lessons learned from post WWI and WWII. And speaking of bailing out allies, I seem to recall the US getting put in a bind during this thing in the Falklands where the US tried to remain neutral as both a member of NATO and OAS. Of course that didn't stop the US in supplying in flight refueling to their NATO allies since they lacked both long distance capabilities along with suitable warships and aircraft to do the job.
But what do I know?
BTW, I do agree with you. The US is no longer spending our tax dollars on basic science for the world's benefit. We're too busy funding this global agency that has no real value. Its called the UN.
The Nuke Blast Icon because we still have enough stockpiled weapons to end life as we know it. A left over from the Cold War Europeans helped start.
Kudos for using the term "God particle" only once, and not in the title. I've seen other sites posting "GOD PARTICLE FOUND" with their comments sections swarmed by people who feel the need to say several variations on the theme "science is useless because God is unknowable". My desire of slapping them in the face is only mitigated by my desire of kicking the "a waste of money" crowd in the nuts.
Well, let's look into the cost question a bit closer, shall we?
The latest figures I can find are that the LHC had cost 7.5 billion euros to June 2010. Let's assume that expenditure has been about steady for the two years since then, that will be a further billion euros to date, in round figures.
That's over 17 years, and it is funded by "Europe", so for the sake of argument let's say 15 countries, to err on the conservative side.
That gives an expenditure of 33.3 million euros per country per year. Which is an utterly trivial rounding error on the budgets of any one of those countries, and is certainly way outside of any definition of "gazillion" I have ever encountered.
I just wish we could get such cooperative international funding applied to more scientific projects, personally.
GJC
Quote Geoff "That gives an expenditure of 33.3 million euros per country per year. Which is an utterly trivial rounding error on the budgets of any one of those countries, and is certainly way outside of any definition of "gazillion" I have ever encountered."
Can we make Bob Diamond pay our share? He'd still have change left over.
"Well, we could start by dismantling the Higgs, now that we've found it.",
I think you'll find that the whole basis of the experiment to find it, is the fact that it dismantles itself, and in doing so they can surmise that it might be there. Tiz a tricky thing to actually 'target' it in actuality for intentional dismantling.
That's over 17 years, and it is funded by "Europe", so for the sake of argument let's say 15 countries, to err on the conservative side.
It's funded by 20 countries, but the contributions are by no means equal. The top 3 contributors; Germany, Fance and Britain contribute over 50%, and the top 6 represent over 75%. See Cern 2010 budget.
"And as usual with these kind of things, it's always in the last place you look!"
I know it's a joke, but the biggest excitement is that it's in the first place they looked as it enhances the evidence for the standard model :-) They predicted mathematically that it would reveal itself at around 125GeV and built a huge machine to go off and look for it experimentally. A very proud day for physics!
I'm not sure that they did find it in the first place they looked, in fact I think that they've tried looking for it for a number of years and that they narrowed down the possibilities using a couple of different colliders before arriving at the result that they have.
I think I may have read stories to that effect in the news recently in fact.
Actually, a 125 GeV Higgs is probably inconsistent with the "Standard Model" at high energies, implying that something further is required. It is however compatible with some of the "super-symmetric" theories. To reinforce the SM one probably needs a Higgs at 135 GeV or more.
@ Crisp. Cue the smartarse response. It was predicted they'd find it at 125 GeV, and they did. So maybe they looked in some other spots, but it turned out to be exactly where it should be.
Just goes to show it's best to start where something ought to be when hunting it.
> It was predicted they'd find it at 125 GeV
LOLNO. Where do you people get that stuff?
As close as 11 August 2011:
http://indico.cern.ch/materialDisplay.py?contribId=54&sessionId=13&materialId=slides&confId=141983
"ATLAS and CMS exclude 145 to 460GeV together. Islands (e.g. 300) not formally excluded, but are
close. Focus on 114-145GeV"
So, presuming that CERN have spotted the Higgs. What's next?
In the popular mind the only reason for the billions spent on the LHC was to find the Higgs (before the yanks did). If it turns out that the scientists there have achieved that goal, how will they justify to the public spending oodles more euros?
Sure, from a scientific perspective, this is just one step down the path to enlightenment - but for yer avrige tabloid reader, how can they be sold the idea that there's still a lot more work to be done.
Unlike the moon landings where public interest dwindled after the "been there, done that" box got ticked, I hope that CERN soon manage to discover another great problem that needs even more billions, or the supercooled LHC could become the world's fastest ice-rink. Whetever CERN do propose for ongoing research, they're going to have their work cut out trying to get a catchier (if equally spurious) name than The God Particle.