Category Archives: science

Goodnight, Tevatron.

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Yesterday was an ending in American high energy particle physics.  I sat with my brother and my friend, drank rum punches, and watched the live stream of the shutdown on a lap top along with about 3000 other people throughout the world.

Oh, the memories, the science, the particles…  what a good time it was.

After it was all over, my friend ordered shots and we toasted Fermilab and the great work they’ve done for 25 years.  We decided the only thing sadder than watching the particle beams shut down and the current leave the magnets was some recent video of Chimps released into the outdoors for the first time in their lives.

RIP Tevatron, yesterday was the end.  But tomorrow, tomorrow will be a new beginning.  For something.  Else.  Hopefully having to do with particle physics.

an alternative to dreamlessness

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i’ve been sort of sad since the space shuttle sent up its last flight, and reading the paper this morning just made me more so.  if you ask me, i think the political parties in washington, fueled by a misguided and uneducated populace are hurtling this country towards irrelevancy and decline.  discussions about debt ceilings are meaningless in light of a 1.2 trillion dollar ongoing war effort.  handwringing about job creation is disingenuous if not criminal in the context of a run away wealth gap.  and in order to protect barrons and emperors, we cut and slash at vital social programs like education, medicare, emergency services, and the development of science.  it’s all backwards and confusing and makes no sense to me.

then, thank god, before the paper got to be too much, I read this: How Seawater Can Power The World.  Amazing.  Only 30 Billion!  Within reach.  100 million degree plasma?  And that’s Celsius.  Unlimited clean power.

Now that doesn’t look TOO hard…  It seems that for a very long time, perhaps as long as I’ve been around, I’ve been reading about things that are important/critical/revolutionary that we must do, can do, ought to do, but can’t because we “lack political will”.  Who is it, exactly, that keeps lacking the will to do these things?  Who is it that keeps stopping these things from proceeding or not proceeding fast enough?  It’s interminable and exhausting and even more depressing.  Damn it.  I thought I was happy I read that article.

What are the 5 big super projects that we could and ought to embrace?  Budgets of >50 billion.  Thousands of people across all walks of life working on?  That would reinvigorate and unite our country?  Get us over this “political will” hump?  Make a difference?  In our life time?  250 billion?  That’s a couple of Groupons, a Joint Strike Fighter, a Bill Gates, and a year or two of Iraq…  seems a no brainer to me.

goodbye space shuttle

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today i watched the final lift off of the space shuttle program, sts-135.  my daughter was sitting in my lap and i was a little teary eyed about the whole thing.  why haven’t i been paying attention to this thing more?  30 years this thing has been doing this and man,  i love it!  i really do.

 

on a technological level, it is absolutely insane.  i don’t even understand .1% of what all what happens to make it work.  but i do know it’s amazing.

on a political level it is confusing and strange that we live in such a stupid country that so many people believe NASA and the space shuttle to be an example of wasteful liberal government programs.  but don’t get me started on that.  and god help me if you start talking about private space exploration and the x-prize and richard branson, my brain will explode.

but, and on a human level, though, we put people inside a machine stacked on a bunch of other machines that are filled with millions of pounds of explosives and light a fuse and shoot it into the sky and people in different control centers push different buttons and 99% of the time everything goes right and it goes up, flies around, builds space stations, fixes things, does science and then comes home and everyone has a beer and can you imagine what it’s like to be the person driving that thing or the person who built a little tiny weeny little switch for the toilet or the flight director or the fuel director or just even someone sitting somewhere watching it shoot up into the sky and hoping and dreaming and imagining what it might one day be like for them to fly into space?

i don’t really remember where i was when the challenger blew up – i was in fourth grade i guess and if pressed i’d say i remember watching it in the library at my high school which would be impossible since i wasn’t in high school, i was in fourth grade.  i think i’m confusing the first gulf war with the challenger, which would make sense to my brain.  i do, though, remember being only somewhat upset, probably because i didn’t really know what it all meant except that it was bad.

and then columbia, i was an asshole in grad school and wrote a stupid play about two guys who find pieces of debris and try to sell it on ebay; it was a bad a play.

and now?  well, now the whole thing is over.  i don’t know what will come next.  the orion space craft, in 2020?  9 years from now… my kids will watch it go up, i hope.  it seems a disappointingly long time.  but maybe that time will give us some room the breathe and think and try to remember why all this matters in the first place.