Morgan BellEurope is now the place to do physics
September 16th 2008 03:07
With all this hoopla about the Large Hadron Collider and the fears about creating a black hole, ripping the Earth into spaghetti-thin strands of broken matter, we've lost sight of one thing: what if falling in a black hole turns out to be a mad party?
No, that's not it. Wait - ...
Ah, yes. The thing about the Large Hadron Collider is that its being built in Europe, on the border of France and Switzerland, both sides celebrating with fondue and fresh baked bread. It's a collaboration between thousands of researchers and potentially hundreds of institution.
As the ideals of science increasingly get twisted and corrupted for personal gain, this is one of the few experiments that can unite scientists.
The thing about the LHC being built in Europe is that it wasn't built in the US. While this may not seem like a big deal - many American scientists will gleefully smash particles at the LHC - Newsweek suggest that this is just one drop in a big bucket of reasons why the US isn't the place to be for fundamental research anymore...
During the Reagan years, a particle smasher was built in Texas, but it fell through due to budget cuts and the public's waning interest is physics.
"Had the Texas project gone forward, says former director Roy Schwitters, who is now a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, "the United States would be the major player in this rather than Europe." Many argue that the harm will extend beyond academia. "The fact that for many years most of this work was done in the U.S. has a lot to do with our position in the world," says physicist Jim Bensinger at Brandeis University in Boston."
Find that Higgs boson, boys and girls...
*this image is from the LHC page on Wikipedia
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