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God’s Broken Machine
As Europe makes repairs to its shiny new particle accelerator, U.S. rivals prepare to steal the prize.
Investors aren’t the only ones feeling a pit in their stomachs lately. Physicists at the world’s biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, are seeing their dreams of Nobel Prizes go down the drain along with the Dow. The collider was sold to the European public as the best chance of discovering a piece of subatomic debris so important to our understanding of the universe that it’s been dubbed the “God Particle.” Less than a month after scientists flipped the switch on the new machine back in September, however, it broke down. Repairs will take a year.
The wait itself isn’t so bad—particle physicists are used to biding their time while technicians fix their big, delicate machines. Now, though, a U.S. rival seems to have exploited the lull by staging a last-minute comeback, threatening to leapfrog the Europeans to the prize. This week scientists at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, will announce new data that not only narrows the gap between them and the coveted God Particle, but also suggests that the LHC may not be particularly well placed to make the discovery at all. The finding is a public-relations blow to the LHC and tarnishes Europe’s newly burnished image as a leader in Big Science.
The problem is partly of the physicists’ own making. The LHC, completed last year at a cost of €3 billion, triggered an American-style media blitz. The BBC devoted an entire day of radio programs to the project. The world’s press ran headlines like “Mankind’s Greatest Experiment,” “Hunt Begins for Secrets of the Universe” and “The Shot Heard Round the Universe.” (NEWSWEEK put the collider on its cover, too.) One account described the LHC itself as the “God Machine.”
Perhaps the biggest mistake was in creating such high expectations for what is only one of many goals, though arguably the most important: to discover the Higgs boson (a.k.a. the God Particle). Whether the Higgs exists goes to the heart of particle physics—if there’s no Higgs, the “standard model” of the universe that physicists have been honing for a half century would need major revision. Finding out entails sending protons around a magnetic racetrack and then smashing them into one another at high energies. The LHC, the argument went, is the only machine big enough to reach the energies needed to make the Higgs (if it exists) appear.
The only problem with that story is that it might not be entirely true. The standard model predicts that the Higgs will fall within a range of energies—from 114 giga-electron-volts to 185 GeV. The LHC is, without question, master of the upper portion of that range. Using it to hunt the Higgs at the lower energies, however, would be like shooting quail with a cruise missile. Fermilab’s smaller Tevatron collider, it turns out, may be better suited. The Higgs, the new Fermilab data show, does not exist for a portion of the upper range, putting it in the Tevatron’s cross hairs and suggesting that the LHC may be more peripheral to the search than previously thought. “We’ve made their jobs a little bit harder,” says Fermilab physicist Dmitry Denisov, “because we’ve excluded the region they’re good at.”
European scientists are putting a brave face on the news. They emphasize all the other things the LHC is expected to do, such as uncovering evidence of higher dimensions and the mysterious “dark matter” thought to make up 70 percent of the universe. “Seeing the Higgs boson is really a small part of the game,” says Sergio Bertolucci, the LHC’s director of research and computing. If the Higgs turns out not to exist, LHC data will help in figuring out why not. If Americans are first to find the Higgs, the LHC will help confirm the discovery and embellish it with detail.
Fermilab scientists, in their magnanimity, are eager to agree. “We could not compete with LHC,” says Denisov. “Our detectors aren’t as modern or complex as LHC’s. But to be able to reach this unexplored region of the universe first is, of course, creating a lot of excitement.” The findings come as a much-needed morale boost in Batavia. The Bush administration had cut Fermilab’s budget, creating a brain drain to Geneva. Now the lab’s 900 scientists have begun to feel young again. Cars can be seen in the parking lots on Saturday nights as researchers pore over experimental data. In the past four months, 30 new Ph.D. students have signed on to help with the research—an increase of 25 percent. “That really helps us,” says Denisov.
Missing the Higgs boson would be a setback not only to the LHC, but it also might lower Europe’s appetite for big, expensive scientific projects that don’t have direct relevance to pressing problems like climate change. For the time being, of course, the poor economy has turned all spending into stimulus. When the crisis settles and the bills come due, however, the physicists in Geneva might want to have some dark matter or a few extra dimensions to show for their efforts.
There’s a window of OPPORTUNITY? Now to take back our country!
Now that the Republican House of cards has crumbled, let’s not waste the opportunity, perhaps it might be the only opportunity, to restore the Constitution and give Americans their country back.
It’s pretty simple really, give the country back to the people. Strap down the lobbyists with very limited accessibility to the D.C. window. Have public funding of all campaigns with no loopholes. Take our right back to print our own money, trash the Federal Reserve (private corporation) by enforcing President Kennedy’s executive order 11110. Abolish the electoral college, it is no longer a viable mechanism for electing our President. Enforce the Anti-Trust laws on the books, there are too many monopolies that have destroy competition, the fundamental backbone, at one time, of capitalism. Stop funding the clandestine operations of the CIA with drug money. Break down the CIA into a much smaller Department, with extreme oversight. Treat all countries people, equally and fairly, we are tied too closely with Israel, and Israel is too involved with our corporate underground. Let the truth be revealed about 911 and Israel involvement with that. Rescind the Patriot Act, the most diabolical set of measures ever enacted to subvert the Constitution. End the privatization of our governmental responsibilities. Do all this and abolish all the legislation and executive orders of the worst criminal this Nation has ever known. It needs to be done in case the former winners come back and we won’t then have a chance to do it. Don’t let them come back and write their history in OUR history books!
The Mailer That Put the Final Nail in the McCain Campaign Coffin
by Rob Kall
Close to 100 million Americans received mailers last week, or will receive them next week that will put the last nail in the coffin of the McCain Pailin campaign.
It wasn’t sent by Obama, nor by 527 group, not by any non-profit or even a political organization.
It didn’t mention McCain or Pailin, Obama or Biden. Didn’t mention taxes or Iraq, Gay Marriage or Abortion or any other campaign hot button topic.
But the mailer, personalized, received by tens of millions of Americans, perhaps 100 million, in the past week, or in the next week, is the single envelope that will have caused John McCain and many republican incumbents to lose their seats.
I got one addressed to my youngest son on Thursday, then another addressed to me on Friday.
Then I talked to friends, members of my synagogue, fellow activists at a local fundraiser. Just about everyone had received them. The message was the same for everyone.
Th first envelope I received, for my son, was a quarterly mutual fund report– where we have most of his college savings. The letter reported that since the beginning of the year, the savings were down 30%– even though the fund was a “blend” fund.
The next envelope, which I received on Friday, was a quarterly report on my IRA, also down over 30%.
These reports were sent out on September 30th, before the market dropped an additional 19%.I knew the numbers I was looking at were much worse, just ten days later.
Tens of millions of Americans, maybe over 100 million Americans have received their quarterly statments this week for IRAs, mutual funds, 401Ks, etc.. They’re all get a mailer that is causing much pain, much stress, acute realization that the economic crisis has hit home.
They’re probably still arriving, as I write this, for a few more days. We’ve seen the result in the polls. The response will grow. The pundits, if they’ve guessed this is about anything else, are probably wrong.
It’s hard to imagine, after eight years of Bush and primarily Republican rule, most Americans not concluding that the GOP and its approach to government and the economy caused their pain, their loss, their fear for the future.
It’s hard to imagine McCain’s campaign getting anywhere with their desperate gambits– abortion this week, what, terrorism next week? Or raising taxes? They saved the average family $2000 or $5000 in taxes over the past eight years and cost them $35,000 or $200,000 in lost retirement savings or depreciated home value.
No. The most powerful election-affecting mailer this cycle is being sent by the financial companies that so many Americans put their trust in. Those quarterly notices are all Obama needs. If he and the DSCC and DCCC congressional campaign committees are smart, they’ll run ads this week referring to those notices. They’ll remind the voters who discontinued the regulations that prevented financial institutions from leveraging themselves so badly– Henry Paulson. They’ll remind voters who pushed for earlier deregulations– Phil Gramm, McCain’s primary economic mentor.
But that’s all icing on the cake. Obama and most of the Democrats running for congress could probably do almost nothing, from this point on (they don’t want people to think that, of course. They want the campaign to re-double efforts.)
These are sad times. Reality is far more powerful than any campaign words. For the neocons, the corporatists and their theocon supporters, the chickens have indeed come home to roost– and they’ve shit all over almost every American. Now, go out and ask anyone you talk to and tie the mailer together with the election, if they haven’t tied it together for themselves yet.
