Friday, April 29, 2011
What happened to all the antimatter after the Big Bang? It's an important
physics question: the theory is that the putative Higgs boson would
catalyze equal numbers of particles and anti-particles. If matter and
antimatter come into contact we get a Big Kablooey, so when antimatter is
missing it's okay to worry. Sam Ting at MIT, who shared the 1976 Nobel
Prize with Burton Richter for discovering the J/Psi particle, now wants to
look for antimatter among cosmic rays, perhaps even determine what
direction theyre coming from. So maybe 17 years ago he went to see Dan
Goldin the NASA administrator, and proposed to hang his Alpha Magnetic
Spectrometer on the space station, bypassing the peer review system. It
was a big mistake but you tend to get away with that kind of stuff if
you're Sam Ting. But although he got around peer review, he landed in the
middle of a dying astronaut program, and it's been delay after delay
including the Columbia disaster. Ting had to appeal directly to Congress
to get on the endeavor mission. The spectrometer should've been launched on
its own platform, as far away from the astronaut program as possible. The
AMS is now a massive $1.5 billion undertaking involving 500 scientists from
56 institutions and 16 countries. . . WAIT, JUST IN! 12:28 Friday: NASA
has postponed today's launch of Endeavour citing a technical problem! Even
if the problem is minor, were looking at a three day delay. Time is
running out for the shuttle -- and for the AMS.
In seeking news on the Endeavor non-launch I found the US news media almost
totally focused on the royal wedding. It particularly pains me to watch
Americans fawning over the monarchy we fought a war to get rid of, and if I
hear "fairytale" mentioned one more time I may become violent.
In fact, we need nuclear power more than ever. However, the Fukushima
Daiichi plant in Japan involves not only damage to three reactors, but also
the loss of cooling water in at least one pool of spent radioactive fuel.
And according to Matthew Wald in today's New York Times that pool was not
loaded nearly as heavily as pools at similar reactors in the United
States. According to an MIT study, the Fukushima storage-pool problem
places more emphasis on getting the geological repository, i.e. Yucca
Mountain, up and running. Engineers involved in the Yucca Mountain project
say that even if Congress could be persuaded to authorize money for a
permanent repository, it would be a few years before the government could
decide whether the site was suitable and many more years before it could
absorb a major fraction of the waste now sitting at reactor sites,
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN01/wn113001.html
.
|
