Friday, February 20, 2009
Clearly reluctant to shut the Large Hadron Collider down right after
turning it on following lengthy repairs, CERN announced last Friday that
the plan is to start the LHC up by the end of September and run all
winter. To add a little show-biz to the turn-on, Tom Hanks has reportedly
been asked to throw the switch. Hanks, who played Robert Langdon in The
DaVinci Code returns in the prequel, Angels and Demons, which was filmed
in part at the LHC. The first proton collisions will take place four or
five weeks after turn-on. Unlike the customary winter shutdown, the LHC
will be kept running right through the winter. Electricity in the winter
months costs about 3 times as much as it does in June, adding $10M to the
electric bill. Could it be that the LHC finds itself in a race to
discover the Higgs?
The economic downturn has a lot of people putting off retirement. And so
it is at Fermilab. The LHC delay has given the Tevatron a shot at finding
the Higgs first. According to yesterday's Science, Tevatron scientists
think they may have the edge. If its mass is somewhere around 165 GeV
they should find it. From a scientific standpoint, the best possible
outcome is for both accelerators to find the Higgs, thus providing
confirmation and making everyone happy.
The public is asked to pick a name for the third node of the International
Space Station. "The name should reflect the spirit of exploration and
cooperation embodied by the space station and follow in the tradition set
by Node 1-Unity and Node 2-Harmony." Node 3 will house life support
equipment like the unit that converts, uh, number one and number two to
drinking water. Six rectangular windows and a circular over-head (sic)
window will provide an "unrivaled" view of Earth. In fact, the ISS is
unsuited for high-resolution observations: Earth is half in the dark and
the center of gravity is constantly shifting due to rotating machinery and
astronauts bumping around. To always observe a full Earth in high
resolution the observer must be a robot at the Lagrange-1 point. Putting
astronauts on space stations is like putting little human tellers inside
ATM machines. While we're at it, we could hang people up all over the
place to snap surveillance photos. It would provide full employment.
If we got that big a fraction of the total federal budget we wouldn't know
how to spend it, and we may not know how to spend this. It's great news,
but science can't afford to screw up the allocation. Initially the bill
ignored NSF completely; it wasn't the science lobbyists that got the
numbers up, it was Republican Sen. Arlen Specter almost single handedly.
(Sorry I was a little late but I was on the road.)
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