Tevatron Has Come To the End of Its Run 115
Med-trump writes "The U.S. government's Chicago-area Fermilab has been at the forefront of high-energy physics. That's in large part thanks to the Tevatron, the machine that first reached the energies needed to discover the last quark in the Standard Model. But the Tevatron has come to the end of its run; at 2pm on Friday, it will be shut down for the last time."
So Long Farewell Avidazen Goodbye (Score:1)
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So Long Farewell Avidazen Goodbye
Auf wiedersehen. It's german ;)
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Who else expanded this thread just to see if "avidazen" was some unfamiliar physics term being used in a pun? C'mon, fess up.
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What's "Goodnight sweet prince" in german? ;)
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Gute nacht suesser prinz
(in suesser the ue should be a u with an umlaut, the ss an esset)
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Gute Nacht süeßer Prinz
Just testing. Somehow I didn't expect that to work.
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What's "Goodnight sweet prince" in german? ;)
fick mich in den Arsch Baby (from the 90s classic Laid in Denmark).
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It's actually "Adios, au revoir, auf wiedersehen ... Goodnight!" He's half-remembering the closing song from the Lawrence Welk show.
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Um, no. It's the song the children sing before going to bed in "The Sound of Music" that he appears to have in mind.
Isn't it from Blazing Saddles?
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Um, no. It's the song the children sing before going to bed in "The Sound of Music" that he appears to have in mind.
Isn't it from Blazing Saddles?
Yes, you've got it exactly right, and it couldn't possibly be from the earlier film The Sound of Music, and even if it was there would be no way of checking in about ten seconds via Google, would there?
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Not before going to bed. Before escaping from the Nazis during their singing performance.
I love it when the nuns pull the coil wire out of the Nazi's car so they can't start it and chase after the Von Trapp's car!
Canadian Version (Score:2)
Well I see by the clock on the wall.
That it's time to bid you one and all:
Goodbye Goodbye
So long So long
Farewell Farewell
Adieu Adieu
Be good Stay Well
Bye Bye Keep Warm
Relax At Ease
Take Care Stay Loose
Adieu mon vieux.
A la prochaine.
Goodbye 'til when we meet again!
No CERN neutrino corroboration? (Score:1)
But but but...
Didn't we just hear they were going to generate more data to corroborate the speed of the neutrino?
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not all of Fermilab is shutting down, just the Tevatron - they can still make a neutrino beam. Just like at CERN, the neutrinos aren't generated by the LHC.
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I'm just waiting for Anonymous to out this racist AC and post their coordinates. Getting their ass kicked every day for the rest of their life will probably reinforce their racism, but who cares? They're worthless anyway, and only demonstrate to everyone how stupid racism is.
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I'm waiting for people to wise up, stop taking the bait and feeding the trolls.
Internet vigilanteism seems infinitely more probable, sadly.
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Slashdot would have to be hacked first - assuming anon post IPs are recorded.
But if it makes you feel any better he's only doing it to troll you and probably isn't really racist IRL. If you want to see real racism, there are white supremacist message boards out there...the real racists aren't anywhere near as creative. Everything they say is like a slow-witted failed comeback.
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I don't care if they "trolled me". The fact is that I welcome someone outing them and kicking their ass. I'm perfectly happy to talk with other people about them, even if they get to watch.
The idea that "they're not really racists" because there are worse racists who don't hide it is part of how stupidity like racism manages to survive and replicate itself through the generations. When someone says things like that, they're a racist. They might be "kidding", but it doesn't matter. That kind of talk in publi
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But if it makes you feel any better he's only doing it to troll you and probably isn't really racist IRL.
I find that implausible, for the simple reason that if I were trolling slashdot I'd choose something that people actually care about here. Although slashdot isn't particularly racist, you certainly get a lot of right wingers moaning about political correctness ("it is my god given right under the Constitution to call a spade a spade, and I'm not talking about the garden implement").
You're much better off mocking Linux or praising Microsoft if you just want to get a reaction.
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No, they had already captured the data, they were looking at interpreting it and checking delays to confirm the CERN results - no new data was to be captured.
And lets face it, CERNs experiment was not the first to track neutrinos, there is plenty of neutrino tracking data sets out there - they just need to be checked with this in mind (remember, if you aren't looking for something, the chances of you finding it when it exists is smaller than when you are actually looking for it - an unexpected discovery is
Actually (Score:5, Informative)
Just looking at the old data will prove nothing from the old MINOS experiment because it suggests that CERN did it right with the OPERA experiment. The problem before is the margin of error on the MINOS test is far too high causing the measured speed to be faster then the speed of light with a margin of error overlapping the speed of light. They need to do a slight upgrade [washingtonpost.com] and redo the tests to get the Margin of Error down.
Re:No CERN neutrino corroboration? (Score:4, Informative)
No. As others said, the Tevatron is just the last stage of a chain of accelerators, one that was used (nowadays) just to collide high energy protons and antiprotons and "see what's inside". The neutrinos come from the previous stage (called "Main Injector"): they used to take a few protons off the beam, collide them into a target in a very well defined direction, focus the muons that come from this, get neutrinos from the muon decay and measure them near the detector and in Minnesota, to get an idea of their oscillation (and now, also of their speed). The experiment that does this is called MINOS, and it doesn't depend on the Tevatron at all. Actually, shutting down the Tevatron will help MINOS: they will get more protons, therefore more neutrinos and more data.
By the way, this is exacly the same general arrangement used by the OPERA experiment (the one with FTL neutrinos), where the neutrinos are produced in CERN and measured there and in Gran Sasso.
In the words of Darth Vader... (Score:3)
Noooooooooooooooo!!!
(as revised by George "Tweaker" Lucas)
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DO NOT WANT!
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Come on, you can't fault Lucas for finally ending the great geek debate over whether Vader threw Sidious down the shaft by accident!
I'll be hoisting a pint... (Score:3, Interesting)
... or two in honor of the Tevatron's long run.
I'm wondering what's going to become of the physicists that work at Fermilab. I know one of them from my college days. He's worked there since graduating in the late '70s, one of the few physics majors I knew that actually found employment doing work in physics. (Many others seemed to go into software development.)
Re:I'll be hoisting a pint... (Score:5, Interesting)
The lab isn't going anywhere. While a few groups are justifiably concerned about their jobs, the overall mood around the lab is optimism. New projects are underway, accelerator research is ongoing, and proposals for new experiments are always in the works.
There's plenty of work left to be done. The real concern going forward is keeping the government willing to spend money on it.
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... or two in honor of the Tevatron's long run.
You've been saying that twice a day for the past month!
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I for one am looking forward to the shutdown. The Tevatron was originally due to be turned off a year or two ago, but that was delayed due to difficulties at CERN. It has caused other Fermilab experiments to be delayed. Particularly in the area of neutrino physics.
Bout right... (Score:1)
Expect to see parts at... (Score:4, Funny)
Weird Stuff and hamfests.
"Whatcha want for this 5 volt, 2,000 amp power supply?"
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"Whatcha want for this 5 volt, 2,000 amp power supply?"
I've got a Higgs boson somewhere you can have for it, but I'll be damned if I can find it.
Party tonight at the Tevatron fellas... (Score:1)
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Sad news (Score:1)
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However, there is one thing I am confused about with the muon: it can decay??
I thought fundamental particles are the smallest that small can get, as in, you can't get anything from "splitting" it, there is no substructure within?
Yes, the muon decays [wikipedia.org]. Just because it's a "fundamental" particle doesn't protect it from E = mc^2, so to speak. Since the muon is a heavier version of the electron, it is also more energetic, and thus the tendency is for it to decay to the less massive/energetic electron.
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However, there is one thing I am confused about with the muon: it can decay??
I thought fundamental particles are the smallest that small can get, as in, you can't get anything from "splitting" it, there is no substructure within?
Isn't this a little nonsensical that the most fundamental particles are capable of decaying in to neutrinos? (more?)
We create exotic particles by accelerating protons and electrons to extreme speeds and smash them together so the energy is converted to mass. As they fall apart they split into smaller particles and some mass is converted to energy. The whole thing is rather counter-intuitive, it's like crashing two cars at 200 mph and the result is a semitrailer weighing much more than both cars put together. Then that semitrailer falls apart in some random way, maybe giving you a bicycle and two motorcycles.
We don't real
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One of the many problem with the Standard Model is that most "fundamental" particles decay. No, that doesn't really make sense - for somehting to decay without external interaction it needs some sort of internal state, and thus something more fundamental must be going on. Nevertheless, the Standard Model is still the best model, with decades wasted on string theory that led nowhere there's not an obvious replacement candidate.
It's too bad though abotu Muon decay - Muon catalized cold fusion would otherwis
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Quantum physics doesn't make sense. So decay without any internal state, or external interaction is par for the course. For what it's worth, Bell's theorem proves that quantum randomness occurs without local hidden variables. Quantum events are wholy, truly, completly, utterly non-deterministic. There is nothing inside a particle that will help you predict when it will decay, it's all down to probability.
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Err, that's not really what Bell's theorem is about, and anyhow it's a bit silly to use "proves" - this isn't math, we don't prove things.
The non-determinism of Quantum mechanics is a useful model, but there's no real reason to believe it's "true" in some deep sense (as with any other model). All the same results (at available experimantal energy levels) would be predictied by a model that has "psuedo randomness" from complex internal state, but such theories aren't very interesting on that basis - they'd
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I've read a lot about Bell's theorem, and everything I've read indicates that that is exactly what Bell's theorem is about. If that's not what Bell's theorem means, why is it one of the most profound results in all of science?
ANAQP though. If you are, I'd love to be corrected.
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One way to look at it is that the fields corresponding to the various particles always exist and may therefore undergo interactions, even if they are in the "ground" state (no real particles) at any time. So you can regard the "internal state" as not of the particle but as of the field itself, and that can change between different excitation (number of particle) states just like an atom can undergo a transition between excited and ground state. E.g. the muon field, electron field, neutrino fields etc. can i
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No, intuitive is right out. If you mean each particle has a field of every potential particle superimposed ... that's a very interesting interpretation, it does almost make sense, if the internal state is some complex interaction between these multiple waves. But sadly it wouldn't seem to clean up any of the other awkwardness of the Standard Model.
Ultimately, from a sense of elegance rather than intuitiveness, you'd expect the complexity of the currently "fundamental" particles to be an emergent behavior
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Nothing you said contradicts anything I said. Yes the thoery allows it. No, it still doesn't make sense for a fundamental partical in isolation to spontaneously change state, nor is there any real reason to believe the Leptons are fundamental "point" particles, it's just that there isn't a better theory around right now. One could easily model a lepton as a combination of smaller particles explaining muon decay much like quarks explain neutron decay, but what would that accomplish in and of itself? You
Don't worry (Score:2)
Tevatron will be resurrected as... GALVATRON!
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As long as we can get Nimoy to do the voice work I'm down.
No Replacement? (Score:2)
Are we replacing this lab with another?
Is the US even capable of doing high energy physics experiments here anymore?
I'm sure the richest people need their tax cuts more than the US needs to be where we determine which basic research is best for us. After all, they created all these negative millions of jobs. Or maybe another lying war or two instead of letting the Chinese or Europeans direct humanity's exploration where it best suits them, regardless of what's good for us.
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No, we're not replacing it. We have made the decision as a society not to compete in accelerators for high-energy physics after we canceled the superconducting supercollider.
We still have good accelerator facilities for light sources, and there is work to build an accelerator at Fermilab with a high-intensity beam. There is also a proposal for a very powerful light source working it's way through the DOE.
Plenty of American physicists do work with facilities overseas. Physics has become very international
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It's not the end of the world for the physicists getting jobs in foreign countries.
It is the end of the "physics is American" world for America.
We have made the decision as a society to spend all our money on the worst stuff and the worst people, as hard and as quickly as possible. We're a superconducting supercollider of money, stupidity, greed, arrogance and fail.
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I think the end of "physics is American" was at least 20 years ago. Most American physicists working on foreign-led collaborations do so from American institutions... as far as I know very few Americans are working in foreign countries.
I do understand the sentiment, though. Over the last 10 years federal funding of high-energy physics has been essential flat... meaning it has been declining in real terms. A shame.
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Yeah, when the budgets didn't mean hundreds of $BILLIONS (only dozens) for Star Wars defense contractors, there was suddenly no more money for science.
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Defense costs are small compared to government transfers of money to the old and poor (which are more than 3x defense), and "science" budgets are quite tiny by comparison to either. But I do agree we're giving as much money as possible to the wrong people as fast and as hard as we can.
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Government transfers of money to the old is money saved from them from before they were old. The transfers of money to the poor are about equal to the money stolen from them in so many ways.
Military/intel costs are over $1.5 TRILLION a year), including loads of money given to the old and the poor: veterans and their families. The entire budget, apart from $TRILLIONS in handouts given to banks, is only $3.5T - including everything else the Federal government does. The proportions are obvious when you're hone
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we spend more on defence than the next TWENTY COUNTRIES COMBINED. Some of them have worked out that the true battle is over industry, economies, and products. We're fighting the wrong war and impoverishing ourselves doing it.
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Government transfers of money to the old is money saved from them from before they were old.
This is completely false, aside from government pensions (to some small %). Social Security is in no way a savings plan, it's a direct transfer of money. Medicare (the largest single expense) doesn't even look like a savings plan. That's just a bizarre claim to make.
. The proportions are obvious when you're honest: we waste most of our money on military/intel. If we spent $300B instead of $1500B, we'd have a surplus (the deficit is $1.17T).
Totally made up numbers. Here are some real numbers:
$820 B - Medicare.
$720 B - Social Security
$699 B - Defense and wars
$412 B - Income Security (informally, "welfare", tho thats really a bad term)
$215 B - Interest on the debt
$210 B - Federal
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Simply not true. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (just about 50% of Medicaid payments now go to the elderly) are now, and always have been, pay-as-you-go programs. "Trust" funds exist primarily to allow irregular revenues to be smoothed. There was a plan to use the SS trust fund to accumulate funding to help pay for the Baby Boomers' benefits, but Congress has probably screwed that up -- they certainly
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No, what you're saying is false. Social Security has $2.5T in money that is invested in Treasury bonds and paid into the fund as the bonds mature, drawn on to pay checks every month. Despite Bush and his Republican Congress trying, and Obama tolerating Republicans and "Conservative" Democrats to try again now to liquidate that fund into the hands of bankers who just smashed the economy, Congress has not yet managed to screw it up. Though with the "tax holidays" they've run during the recession that often re
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No, SS does not have treasury bonds in the usual sense. It only has a record-keeping entry of no economic value (the "special bonds" it holds can't be sold).
Many people are confused by this. It's just as ig you had borrowed all of the money from your 401K. You still have an asset in your 401K at that point (the loan to your self), and there's even interest associated with it, but it has no economic value - because you can only take another dollar out if you yourself put that dollar in.
The SS trust fund i
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Note that
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No, it can't sell the bonds, but it collects the interest on them as they mature. Thereby investing SS funds in the safest investment available, especially over the long times that represent a career saving for retirement.
That is not as if you borrowed the money from your 401K. The loan (from SS to Treasury) is not to "itself", because without that loan the Treasury wouldn't have that money. Treasury and SS are different, since Treasury doesn't carry any savings, and simply because they are independent of e
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There's effectively only one pool of money now. SS can'r pay anyone, can't send a single check, without funds from taxes or borrowing. Why is that hard to understand? The SS trust can't sell its "bonds" - the only way it can spend a dime is if that dime comes into the federal government through the usual channels.
And treasury debt stopped being "really low risk" this summer. It's now "relatively low risk", which is a different thing entirely (other sovereign debt sucks more).
But that aside, we have an i
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Defense costs are small compared to government transfers of money to the old and poor... we're giving as much money as possible to the wrong people
Because God forbid that our parents should get to eat after they're done building our basement 3D TV hangouts... and we're all better off with a starving, diseased criminal underclass hating us than with a happy productive, educated citizenry invested in the nation ... right?
I really don't understand this American fixation with demonising the poor and elderly and hero-worshipping the military. It seems about as far from the dream of "liberty and justice for all" as you can get.
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Equality of opportunity is the enemy of equality of outcomes. America was built on the former. Socialism is all about the latter.
Few people actually demonise the poor, but many like me feel that charity-at-gunpoint is just wrong, both morally evil and unsustainable in a democracy. Sadly, we've all but lost the non-government charities for the old and poor these days, unless you attend a church you trust financially (which certainly isn't the norm these days).
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Physics like what's conducted at the Tevatron does many useful things.
Firstly, it simply helps us understand the entire universe, from the parts close to us and our size, to tiny parts, to distant and large parts. The basic knowledge helps us know things about a most things that exist - and that those that don't, don't.
Secondly, industry, including telecom, medicine and manufacturing, all rely on improvements in the physics model for better machines, materials and chemistry. Energy efficiency is locked up i
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I'm sure there was a time when the Tevatron was useful, just as there was a time when the Turing test was useful, but I don't see either of these fields showing either growth or usefulness now. Am I wrong?
Yes, you are wrong, on both counts.
The development of true human-level artificial intelligence would be a discovery that would eclipse everything else humans have ever done. How would you feel to have a robot that would go to work in your place and let you do whatever you'd like to do best? A robot that would know every profession, every trade, with a mind superior to the greatest scientist that ever lived until now?
In physics we are still short of a universal theory. We do not have any idea on how to unify
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There's the tragedy of humans lack of imagination and stubborn insistence on stupid dogma right there. Given robots that could perform all the labour that the human race needs to survive, the parent AC can't imagine how the human race could survive since they wouldn't have jobs. Maybe the AC was playing devil's advocate, but even if that's the case, the attitude is a pretty common one. So many people just cannot comprehend how a post-scarcity economy could work. I remember talking to some friends about the
And so the US fades into second place (Score:3)
in yet another science and technology field.
However, there is no reason to fear. The military technology budget is largely unscathed.
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The US has been in second place (or worse) for a long time now. Even before the Tevatron shut down.
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Who's in first? Seriously..... And don't say "I don't know". He's on second.... Which country is in first place in the "fermi lab" kind of physics area? It's not the LHC. That's a bunch of countries, the US included... Japan with their neutrino searching facilities? Who really leads the world in this area?
Re:And so the US fades into second place (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you think you need to be #1 in everything? Yeah, I know I'm going to be modded down as flamebait, probably rightly so, but still this needs to be said.
What makes you think you even can be #1 in everything? Now I realize you Americans tend to see yourselves as #1 in everything, or that's how it looks to the rest of the world, expect the few hot topics of the day where you grudgingly admit falling to "#2 place" (probably because you think it as "#1: Rest of the world; #2: America" so there is no third place) and which nobody remembers a week from now.
Seriously. You cannot compete and win in everything. You choose your specialty and excel in that. Then you spin that as the most important thing in the world so you can feed your overly nationalistic prides. That's what it looks like to the rest of the world. But even then you sometimes you have to make strategic changes to your areas of focus.
No, it's not like most other countries don't do that kind of chutzpah, but there's a difference in degree. It seems to have a strong correlation to all kind of flag-waving and pledges to the flag in classrooms. That too happens mainly 1) in African banana republics and 2) the USA. And the rest of the developed world cares more about case #2 because we have more dealings with you. Please, please grow up and realize that the world doesn't revolve around you. You cannot be #1 in everything. You are not that great and that much above everybody else, and that kind of arrogance only serves to annoy the rest of the civilized world.
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Why do you think you need to be #1 in everything?
I've been quietly saying this for years. A friend a couple months ago mentioned how China was becoming the #1 economic superpower. My response was, "Great. maybe everyone in the world will blame them for all their problems now."
Now I realize you Americans tend to see yourselves as #1 in everything
You know, it's possible to discuss this subject without bigoted broad brushing.
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That too happens mainly 1) in African banana republics and 2) the USA
Excuse me... but shouldn't that be 1) the USA and 2) in African banana republics
Fermilab research will continue after Tevatron (Score:2)
http://goo.gl/kqXJa [goo.gl]
among the highlights - they get the data from CERN in realtime, and can actually control the LHC remotely.
oh, and the buttons to stop & start the tevatron are pretty cool ;)
What sound will it make? (Score:2)
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What happens to the helium? (Score:2)
I wonder what happens to all the liquid helium in the system. Isn't it worth on the order of 100k USD? Perhaps it could be sold of and turned into a scholarship?