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."
Re:No CERN neutrino corroboration? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:No Replacement? (Score:3, Informative)
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 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). The military/intel waste is practically our entire problem, especially since dollars pushed through it is some of the least productive in creating other production for American consumption, or anything else of value to America.