Texas Higgs hunters mourn the particle that got away
Now that the elusive Higgs boson has, for all intents and purposes, been goosed into existence, the scientific world is popping champagne corks, lifting pints, and otherwise celebrating CERN's apparent success. Well, almost all of the scientific world. Deep in the heart of Texas, a small group of dispirited particle physicists …
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Re: ... Pluto
@ Paw Bokenfohr
I agree that the reclassification of Pluto shouldn't deter someone who is remotely interested in science. I was more concerned with the younger ones who are in the verge of getting hooked. Pluto's demise seems to me to be unhelpful in that context.
I would have been quite happy to see Eris as a 10th planet - that wouldn't shake anyone's foundations. On the contrary, it would have sparked even more interest in the minds of the unattached.
And OK, I withdraw the 'Idiots' remark. I thought the decision was idiotic, but of course that doesn't mean those who took it are idiots.
@ John H Woods
"...it was not some discovery about Pluto (OMG it isn't a planet after all)..." is the key thing to me. If it had been discovered that Pluto was actually something else entirely, such that our whole concept of 'planet' was under threat, then reclassification would have been a very necessary thing.
As it is I feel that the reasoning was more about the problems of having to allow more such objects into the club. I would have been happy to see them go for your option (2) - that would have been exciting.
@ No, I will not fix your computer
"Don't sit back and complain that scientists redefine your childhood, look forward and realise that you're living in an amazing period of discovery."
Ok, I concede - that was a good slap in the face.
I comment on the Register in order to give a view or to be enlightened. I now understand better why it was done and accept that it was probably a sensible move from the scientific perspective.
I still hold, though, to the view that the change to Pluto's status was not good PR, but I guess I'll get over it.
Re: Says it all about American attitudes...
"Why am I reminded of the cries of anguish that came when Pluto lost its planetary status? That came from America and nowhere else? The chief reason for all that particular fuss when you stripped everything away was "It means the US hasn't discovered a planet anymore." Nothing to do with the actual science at all."
Have you got some citations for this, because it looks like bullshit to me.
just wondering when apple are going to submit a patnt application for the higgs boson particle for its use electronic devices, and then suing the ass off everyone for patnt violations banning the import of everything to the USA
Politics led to cost overruns
The SSC could have been built as an extension to the FermiLab accelerator, which would have drastically reduced the cost. It was the political pork barreling of Pres. Bush the First and Sen. Phil Gram (head of the Senate budget committee) which moved the project to oil and cattle country. Then Clinton was elected and the Democratic Congress killed the SSC entirely. When the Republican Congress took over two years later, it was led by budget hawks who saw no need to revive the project. Often scientists who play politics end up shooting themselves in the foot - Steven "First Three Minutes" Weinberg, who was chairman of the UT Austin Physics department at the time, lobbied hard to have the SSC built next door and not in Illinois. As a result he and American high energy physics community ended up with nada.
"The super collider would help us learn the laws of nature. Doesn't that deserve a high priority?' And he said 'no'."
Down vote me all you like, but I have to agree. $12 Billion+ is alot of money and it was worth even more 20 years ago. You can pay for a lot of other Science with that amount of money.
Like an International Space Station? Oh, wait--that actually cost us more than $50 billion!
Re: Like an Internation Space Station
No. Not like that. The AC said "science".
However, it *is* still true that the SSC and the LHC could have been built on the sort of budgets that are regularly pissed away not in defence projects but in changes of mind on said defence projects.
It is never about the money. What counts is the politics. Specifically, when money gets tight, is it you or some other sucker who has to tighten their belt first? As far as I can see, the very first items to go in any austerity program are pure science and the arts. As far as politicians are concerned, both are things we do "because we are human", and therefore both are optional.
You know what adds to the entire suckiness of this? It had been proposed at some point that this huge whole in the ground that wasn't going anywhere could possibly be used as a mushroom farm. That didn't fly either....
American Babel
I was extremely saddened when I heard that SSC had been cancelled. ISS was about to fall under the axe, too, but a public outcry saved it. I think it is obvious that SSC would have accomplished more than ISS ever will, but it is difficult to fight a mass public outcry. That's why NASA flies so many purple pigeons, instead of doing the best science.
One of my first goals after I began exploring Texas was visiting the SSC site. With the help of locals, I eventually found it. The door to the main control building was open, so I went inside, where I found it had been converted into a make-shift warehouse. It appeared that its main use at the time was storing styrofoam food containers. I found no one in the building. Outside, all the tunnels were filled in with rocks before I arrived. I walked out to a mound behind the building and shot photos of white rocks sticking out of the Texas prairie. After I drove around the site, I continued on my way. As I went to the next town, I heard on the radio that police had caught someone trespassing at the site and detained him. I sure was glad they didn't catch me!
I deeply regret that my nation has forfeited its leadership in science. They don't even know what they have done to themselves.
Re: American Babel
"I think it is obvious that SSC would have accomplished more than ISS ever will,..."
Could you explain *why* it is so "obvious" because it certainly isn't obvious to me.
Re: American Babel
Certainly!
SSC had a specific scientific objective from the start. ISS never has.
Texas SSC
I worked directly with the SSC purchasing group when the project was being constructed. Sadly, it was never finished for a couple of reasons, concern over cost over runs and the fact that DOE and Congress were never 100% committed as they subjected the financing to only an annual basis.
Couple of events that stand out of poor executive management of the project.
Engineers and QC personnel wanted to visit one of our manufacturing facilities for purposes of a quality audit. We determine a date some 5-6 weeks in advance and I proceed to book my airplane flight to get the least expensive rate. Week before the trip I am at the SSC Lab and asked the question when they would be arriving and perhaps we could have dinner together. I was told that they had not made reservations as plans so often changed and their travel agent did not like to book over a day or two in advance! Of course the airfare would then be outrageous and teh travel agent would make more as they got a % of the ticket as commission. Sounds small and it is small money compared to teh billions spent but string together any number of wastes like this and it really adds up. The culture seemed to promote this mentality.
The other event was we were approved and documented all of the required certifications, etc. We started getting orders along with about 20 pages of duplicate paperwork. Told them we had already filled out that out and was told, you have to do that on each and every order, regardless of size.
All said and done, we determined that we would have to hire one additional person just to complete, maintain and track the myriad of reports they required.
We asked to be excused as a supplier for that simple reason, the cost of doing business was not worth the potential profit of the project.
Priorities?
Too expensive, the SSC? Well, nothing that a few days of military budget wouldn't cover...
Re: Priorities?
Ironically, at the time, that big outcry was to cut the military, because the Soviet Union had just fallen. This was called the Peace Dividend.
The fundies control the funding
Science is definitely not on their agenda.
Re: The fundies control the funding
It depends on how you define Science, for some 'merkins this is science http://creationmuseum.org/
Re: The fundies control the funding
Its the God Particle,, you would think they would all want to worship it
So I said super-collider...
... I just met her! And then they built the super collider.
Anecdote accepted. Snappy comeback not found.
Two downvotes?
For a semi-relevant futurama quote?
You people have no soul...
"we do still exercise at least some smal influence in the world - the internet, facebook"
Oh yes, I remember, Arpanet but didn't allow use by non-military people, yeah that was progress. Let me think where the web was invented, oh yes, CERN again, and by a Brit. And facebook .... hahaha yeah that's a real breakthrough
Re: "we do still exercise at least some smal influence in the world - the internet, facebook"
Mocking my post for issues already referenced or qualified within it seems pointless. This response does, too, actually, but it's 2:30am (obvioisly another failing of the US as it's already morning in Britain) and I'm too tired to lnow better.
Re: "we do still exercise at least some smal influence in the world - the internet, facebook"
@Purlieu
Stop reading the Reg, go away and don't come back until you've learnt the difference between the Internet and the Web.
Re: "we do still exercise at least some smal influence in the world - the internet, facebook"
...and you anonymous down-voters can flick right off, too.
You can only survive multibillion bloat of you are military or a white elephant in orbit!
It was pretty amazing that Congress was talking about balancing the budget back then while now they have all but given up.
Why the SSC Was Terminated : http://www.aip.org/fyi/1993/fyi93.142.txt
The Decline and Fall of the SSC : http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw84.html
In the latter we read:
"It is common wisdom in Washington, D.C., that it is dangerous for a large project to span more than one Administration. Bush was defeated by Clinton in 1992, and the SSC project came to violate this rule and suffer the consequences. In 1993 the incoming Clinton Administration made a budget-tightening decision to stretch out the SSC project, moving its date of completion from 1999 to 2003, increasing the overall cost of the project while reducing its yearly cost. The SSC cost rose to over $10 billion, a 16% cost increase. The budget-conscious freshman Congressmen swept in with with Clinton in November of 1992 felt no responsibility for the decisions of their predecessors, and the SSC project became a tempting target of opportunity.
Clinton's new Science Advisor John Gibbons did not give active support to the SSC project, as had his predecessor, Alan Bromley, and Clinton's new Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, now famous for her million dollar travel excursions, proclaimed during her confirmation hearings that she was "not passionate" about the SSC. In September, 1993 when her passions were finally aroused, she took the counter-productive steps of re-shuffling major SSC contractors and increasing the already bloated oversight team to 140 bureaucrats in the Dallas DOE Office. Before the two critical votes in June and October, neither Clinton nor Gore was willing to make personal appeals to House Members on behalf of the SSC, as Bush had in 1992.
The final blow to the SSC came late in 1993 when the DOE's Baseline Validation Report was released. The validation group surveyed the sorry history of SSC cost escalations and concluded that extreme conservatism was needed. Their report advocated much larger safety and contingency margins and moved the completion date back to 2004, increasing the project cost to $11.5 billion or another 15% increase.
With this, rank-and-file members of Congress had had enough. They were fed up with the ever-rising SSC price tag, the evidence of poor management and DOE indecisiveness, and the heavy-handed attempts by Congressional Leadership to save the project. On October 27, 1993, by a vote of 283 to 143 the House rejected the Conference Committee report that would have continued SSC funding. The project was officially dead."
Re: You can only survive multibillion bloat of you are military or a white elephant in orbit!
With management like that, it's possible it would never have worked properly anyway.
CERN had issues getting the LHC running, and it's a much smaller and less complicated beast.
The issues were solved, but CERN has always had the advantage of being an international project with mostly sane management and minimal political interference. The relative cost to each member is small, and it slips through the cracks politically.
The fail with the SSC was demanding a giant hand-out from a single national government in return for a rather fuzzy prospect of national prestige.
SSC could easily have been an international collaboration. But Texas wanted it all, so ultimately Texas got nothing.
Shouldn't have called it the "God" particle
You know how sniffy the Darwinian evolution-denying right get.
Re: Shouldn't have called it the "God" particle
In an election year, if SSC *had* found it they'd have called it the GOP particle...
Is it just me
Am i the only one that thinks this is a giant waste of time and money! I mean how much could the cost of these things helped in the current climat???? Billions of ££ to emply a few over rated scientists and for what?
Dont get me wrong its all very interesting and its a great discovary but, does it actually change anything at all about anything???? So we have confirmed what some people thought great now tell me why this makes anyones lives better bar the scientists who will now rake in the cash for a discoavary that cost the rest of us a fortune for them to find.
Dont get me wrong I love science and we need bigger budgets but if we leave it to them to decide this is what happens. How about we spend that cash finding alternative fuels or resurch into mechanical limbs etc. I know thay all have cash but really would they not benefit from this cash pot more and to a much greater aid to humanity???
Re: Is it just me
Welcome to tax and spend action. You may not like some of it. Libertarian yet?
> spend that cash finding alternative fuels or resurch into mechanical limbs etc.
This is ongoing too, dontcha worry. Though the chance to "find alternative fuels" is slim indeed. Also better left to the private sector, really.
Re: Is it just me
The original research into lasers and transistors would certainly justify a similar response. They certainly had no remotely perceptible influence on anything 'real' like medicine or improving crop yields or helping the poor.
And yet here we are - in a world which I am confident in saying has been markedly improved by optics and computers.
No, we don't have any idea what might come of high energy physics research. That is precisely the reason we need to keep doing it.
Re: Is it just me
Hopefully it is just you, but unfortunately I doubt it
Re: Is it just me
You can never know what you're going to discover until you do these experiments, so it's impossible to say whether they were worthwhile or not until afterwards.
What if the result of some huge, expensive, scientific experiment is the accidental discovery of a cure for Alzheimer's disease? Or a new source of clean energy? We must, always, continue to do this sort of science, just so that we can keep learning. That is never wasted.
Re: Is it just me
Transistors had fairly obvious applications almost immediately. Lasers were less obvious, because it took quite a while to create constant-wave semiconductor lasers that worked at room temperatures. The original ruby pulsed wave design isn't used much.
But compared to the LHC, lasers and transistors are practical engineering. At the moment there's no realistic prospect of being able to manipulate the Higgs field. At all.
Something useful may fall out of quantum gravity, as and when. But that's decades away, at least.
The problem is the Standard Model is kludged together from a big pile of Swiss Army maths. It's descriptive by analogy and partly by lucky guesswork, not so much from clean first principles. So I wouldn't expect any useful technology from it until that changes.
Re: Is it just me
I remember lasers bein gdubbed 'a solution looking for a problem' - for a period of time it seemed you could apply a frikkin' laser to almost anything.
Downstairs where I'm currently working they have a big frikkin' laser behind a door marked 'Femto-second laboratory'. I think that's where they bottle really really small amounts of time for busy people who want to get things done very quickly... or something.
Re: Is it just me
It's just you. Well, you and a small bunch of assorted whingers and naysayers, moving in circles so small it's a wonder you don't get giddy.
Had you and your attitude been around in the Stone Age, we probably would never have bothered with fire.
Re: transistors
"Transistors had fairly obvious applications almost immediately."
That depends on when you start the clock. The transistor was designed on paper in the late 30s starting from basic quantum theory as applied to crystalline structures. The basic quantum theory in question dates from the mid-20s. The underlying problem that the basic quantum theory solved was first apparent at the end of the 19th century. But if you go back *that* far, you just have a bunch of boffins fretting about an ultra-violet catastrophe that ought to prevent the universe from existing. What should *their* budget be?
Re: Is it just me
Spoken like a true bean counter.
Fortunately primitive man didn't apply the same thought processes as you, otherwise we'd still be living in caves and freezing, after all what possible benefit could there be in researching this new fangled 'fire' thing?
Sad, but...
Since the start of the project, the estimate of the final cost had risen by a factor of 4.
The people holding the purse strings had a tough decision to make: Continue funding the project, with no confidence that the latest budget cost was the final one, or pull the plug.
We may all hate it when our pet project is cancelled, but the money men have a finite resource to look after.
The stupid decision to build it in Texas just because Bush was Texan...
Projects of such a large scale cannot be used to get more political gains. Why building it in Texas when everything had to be built from scratch, increasing costs? Just because the then president was a Texan? The as the new president is from another state the whole project gets killed because money has to go to the new president state? That's silly politics not good government.
CERN reused a lot of its facilities to build the new LHC. They didn't rebuild everything at another site. Maybe if they had reused what was reausable at the FermiLab some costs could have been avoided.
Re: The stupid decision to build it in Texas just because Bush was Texan...
NOPE!
Texas was in discussion under the Reagan administration and AFAIK the decision for Texas was made before 1988.
http://mist.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw25.html (March 1988)
--> Where will the SSC be built?
A: That remains an open question. Originally the SSC site proposals were to be submitted by August 3, 1987, with final site selection in January of 1989. Congress, sensing the great "slice of pork" implicit in placing a $4.4 billion facility with an annual $370 million operating budget in just one lucky state, voted to extend the deadline a month to September 2, 1987, giving slow starters a better chance to compete. It is expected that a large number of states will submit site proposals. In the 1960's when what became FermiLab was being considered there were 135 site proposals. There will probably be less for the SSC, but more than 25 are expected. Some of the leading contenders for the SSC site are Illinois (the FermiLab Tevatron could serve as an injector), New York (congressional clout, close to many East Coast universities and labs), Colorado (good site near Denver airport), Texas (congressional clout, much effort on proposal), Washington (good site near Spokane airport, cheap electric power), Arizona (good desert site, room for expansion), and Tennessee (big state commitment, TVA power).
Re: The stupid decision to build it in Texas just because Bush was Texan...
The Bushes just pretend to be Texan - they're actually East Coast "elite" - Bush 41 was born in Taxachusetts, and Bush 43 in Connecticut.
Sour grapes
"The Higgs boson was supposed to be theirs, but congressional budget hawks snatched it away"
Or... "congratulations Europe" to approach it from a more civil angle.
The next article will be by a lemon-chewing Lewis Page, decrying Apollo 11 mission whilst dwelling on the British Empire's 1930s plans to develop a lunar module with matching space suits*. The human race could have been on the moon in 1933, and it would have been a British moon made from British cheese, heavily populated today by the descendents of every convicted British criminal over the last 80 years, some of whom would regularly fly back every year to beat us at cricket.
Apart from the rubbish dark side of the moon, which would have been left to the French to develop into a cold and less developed bilingual colony with a love-hate relationship with the Royal Family.
* This actually happened.
Aha! The Friday Portal reference!
Sour Grapes
Incendiary Lemons!
Re: Aha! The Friday Portal reference!
Sir, Mr Higgs Johnson is on the interphone!
So precisely do we benefit from discovering higgs?
As all I can see is billions poured into a "we were right all along" project. It's not like it's going to lead to a cure for cancer or anything....
Perhaps I am missing something...
Re: So precisely do we benefit from discovering higgs?
Yes, you are
Re: So precisely do we benefit from discovering higgs?
You are missing that it's not a "we were right all along" project.
Once you get that, come back.
Re: So precisely do we benefit from discovering higgs?
I'm sure that there were cavemen asking the same question about discovering fire (or rather how it could be moved from one place to another and kept going).
Re: So precisely do we benefit from discovering higgs?
To be fair to the OP, it was only a few months ago that the BBC website was carrying articles stating that one of the benefits of finding the Higgs would be faster mobile phones.
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