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Super Colliders V057:
By Willie Gaffer:
September 11, 2006:
A while back I wrote some stuff about string theory, see my essay V054. That is the current popular theory among physicists which postulate the universe is composed of tiny strings of energy which resonate at different frequencies allowing them to appear as different kinds of particles. The question arises, where or how do these physicists got hooked into such strange theories? Where do they get their information?
Aside from their own fertile mental speculations, the answer is Super Colliders. These are huge tools which they use to slam particles together to cause collisions. When the particles collide head on, which they sometimes do, they produce other particles. Now these particles are not visible to the naked eye, but they do leave evidence of their passage. These scientists then surmise what happened from the evidence. We can liken it to police figuring out what happened in an auto accident by looking at the skid marks of the tires.
Well, what is a super collider really? Although these things have various names, like storage ring collider accelerator and particle accelerator, they are all similar in function. In practice the instrument is a large underground tunnel in the form of a ring wherein particle streams are accelerated and caused to collide. By large tunnel I mean a radius of miles, not feet. The largest now in existence in America is called the Tevatron with a radius of 3.9 miles. Clearly we cannot just build these things anywhere. The Tevatron is installed at a facility called Fermilab. The official name is Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory which is located near Batavia, Illinois.
The facility is operated for the United States Department of Energy by Universities Research Association, Inc. That is just a consortium of universities in the United States, Japan, and Canada. Fermi, by the way, was an Italian American scientist. His full name is Enrico Fermi. This guy won a 1938 Nobel Prize for his work on artificial radioactivity caused by neutron bombardment. Then he went on to produce the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942. For sure, that work was essential to the creation of the atomic bomb
As I said, Fermilab's primary instrument is the Tevatron. It is a particle accelerator called a proton synchrotron located in a circular underground tunnel. That is the main accelerator at Fermilab. The first accelerator, called the Main Ring, began operating in 1972. It got demoted when the Tevatron came online in the early 1980s. The Main Ring became a pre-accelerator injector for the Tevatron, Later, in 1999, the Main Ring was replaced by a new Main Ring which helped to increase the number of particle collisions. Currently this installation is the most powerful accelerator in the world. It is capable of accelerating particles to energies of 1 trillion electron volts (TeV).
In a few years this accelerator will not be the most powerful
in the world. There is a consortium of European nations called
CERN. The acronym stands for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche
Nucléaire. That was the name of the original provisional
study group. The group was reorganized in 1954 as the European
Organization for Nuclear Research. However, they keep the original
acronym. They now have 20 member nations cooperating in this research
work.
These guys are serious and they are in competition with the United States in the ongoing effort to understand the nature of our universe. CERN is located at a facility near Geneva. They already have Colliders on line, but their=s does not compare to the Fermilab setup. Their first installation was a 600 million electron volt (MeV) proton Synchro Cyclotron which came online in 1957. They did not quit there. In 1959 they brought a 28 billion electron volt (GeV) Proton Synchrotron on line. For a while, that was the world's most powerful accelerator.
A few years later, in the early 1980s they upped the anti to build a 500 GeV accelerator. All that did was keep them even with Fermilab=s Tevatron, but Fermilab went on to raise the anti again to their 1 TeV system. The competition continues even now, but America has dropped out of the race. In 1988 America had begun construction of a Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) near Waxahachie, Texas. The plan was for a 54 mile long collider. However, our congress, in it=s infinite wisdom killed the project in 1993. The rational was, the cost of 10 billion bucks was too high.
These wallowing swine can spend millions of bucks to build a bridge to nowhere. They can spend millions of bucks on an airport to serve just one Senator. They can spend billions on that stupid Boston tunnel, and piss away billions of dollars for George=s personal war, but they cannot put a tiny 10 billion buck drop into the scientific bucket. Think of this the next time you hear one of these short sighted buffoons babble about our kids not getting enough science and math in school. We are out of the race and Europe is going full speed ahead.
Yes, CERN is now proceeding with the construction of their
Large Hadron Collider (LHC). When it is completed, as one American
physicist put it, it will blow Fermilab out of the water. Construction
began in 2005 when the first superconducting dipole magnet was
put in place. When it is complete we can expect an exodus of American
scientist to CERN. Some of them are already there. These guys
are true professionals in the scientific world. They will see
the LHC as a golden opportunity. Why in the world would these
guys want to play on the Fermi sandlot when they can play in a
state of the art arena? What would you do?
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