US Particle Colliders In Need of Funding 133
DevotedSkeptic writes "When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland seized the world record for the highest-energy collisions in 2010, it also sealed the fate of the leading US particle collider. The Tevatron, at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, was closed the following year to save money. Now, physicists at another US physics facility, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, are trying to avoid a similar end. On 13 August, researchers at the ALICE heavy-ion experiment at the LHC at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, announced that they had created the hottest-ever man-made plasma of quarks and gluons. This eclipsed the record temperature achieved at RHIC two years earlier by 38%, and raised uncomfortable questions about RHIC's future. Tribble still hopes to avoid having to close any of the three facilities. In 2005, he notes, a similar crisis was averted after an advisory committee laid out the dire consequences of flat funding for the future of US nuclear science. In the end, Congress came through with the budgetary increases required. 'What we want to do here is to spell out what will be lost under different budgets,' he says. His committee is planning to hold a final meeting in November, in time to influence the budget requests from US funding agencies for the next fiscal year."
Research is no dick-contest (Score:1, Informative)
Sadly, politicians do not realise that.
Research is about finding new things about the universe and this accelerator does not compete with that. They are different machines, made to examine different pieces of the universe and by adding the findings we learn more than if we had only one or two accelerators.
Sadly, funding is tied to "highest energy", "longest tunnel", "highest temperature" and those who cancel the projects do not get that it actually is not about "Hehe, now we showed them damned europeans/americans/chinese/russians!!!1" but about... research.
Re:Crisis? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah 'cause the republitards are so invested in science eh ?
The Dems had full control of Congress and the WH for 2 years, and they still have the WH and the Senate. They spent staggering amounts of other people's money.
Funny how the "Party of Science!!" didn't see fit to bother spending any of that loot on these projects.
Heck, they still could. There's billions of (un)Stimulus money still unspent that Obama could use Executive Orders to direct a tiny fraction of towards these projects and fully fund them.
Actions speak louder than words, and the Dems through their actions are screaming that their political pals getting a boatload of our cash is far more important than science, despite what they say in their talking points on TV.
Truth be told, *neither* party really gives a rip about all that "science stuff" when it comes right down to it, if it doesn't give them some kind of political advantage and/or funnel some cash to an ally.
Stop being so blinded by (D) and (R) partisan distractions. It doesn't make you look smart. It makes you look like a mind-numbed drone.
Strat