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Shutting Down the Tevatron sounds like a new movie about the demise of the Tron brothers. It could not possibly be the plot for a movie, however, because the sad ending would discourage all attendees.
The Tevatron is an humongous machine built in 1985 at Fermilab. At that time, it cost $120M but the current total investment would easily exceed a billion dollars. (Of course that’s counting the tens of thousand of technology jobs it produced and the money that went into US companies to build and maintain the facility. Be circumspect how you evaluate “cost.” It certainly produced thousands more real jobs than the silly programs currently headlining the newspapers and costing considerably more by the same measure.)
Fermilab is one of 13 National Laboratories, this particular one being about 40 miles west of Chicago. (Other National Labs include names like Los Alamos, Sandia, Brookhaven, and Oak Ridge). Fermilab is named after physicist, Enrico Fermi, (Italian, 1901-1954) who won the 1938 Nobel Prize for his “discovery of new radioactive elements.” Fermilab is specifically chartered to conduct basic research in high energy physics.
The Tevatron is a machine for putting a tera-electron-volt (1012 eV) of energy into a stream of protons, sending them around a four-mile track and then colliding them. A “tera” is one million million electron-volts of energy. That sounds like a lot of energy, but the electron-volt (eV) is tiny, tiny. In macroscopic terms the 2 TeV Tevatron produces only about one ten-thousandth of one millionth of a Calorie – the kind you consume by the hundreds at Whataburger. “What?” You say. “A half-billion dollars for a 40-foot tall machine that produces one ten-thousandth of one millionth of a Calorie of energy?”
Well, “Yes.” But, the problem is not producing that tee-tiny amount of energy. It’s putting that tee-tiny amount of energy into one proton. That proton doesn’t think it’s tee tiny because it kicks butt around the track at fractions of the speed of light.
Why would someone want to do that?
To discover how nature works at a fundamental level. And, if we can discover how nature works, we can discover how we work and what we can do about it. We can create new ideas that advance our existence and our livelihood, that’s why. Many of the medical treatments and diagnostics we use today are the product of what was then research into the fundamental behavior of matter. Some of you are alive to read this because of such fundamental research. Similar fundamental research is responsible for every electronic device you own, computers, navigation, cell phones, and whatever you are using to read this blog. Technology is essential to our existence. (If you don’t think so, then let’s have the government confiscate all computers and cell phones and then give me an opinion.)
Rest in Peace, noble Tevatron.
Last week, the government shut down the Tevatron. It’s heir apparent was once the Superconducting Supercollider, but congressional wisdom aborted that back in 1993. The Superconducting Supercollider was aborted while hardly even a fetus.
So, without the Tevatron, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland attracts all the research in high energy physics. Yes, Geneva, Switzerland. (That’s not in the US.) The LHC is the new heir for high energy physics. LHC came to life a year or so ago. It is not a product of US technology or ingenuity, but our scientists are flocking there to work on it. That means more jobs lost in the US and more technology leaving our country. And this technology at the very fundamental levels of physics. The level that produces major jobs for the future.
Oh, to be sure, some US physicist will make a (joint) discovery that will fill the US newspapers. No doubt, Congress and the Administration will credit someone with the greatest discoveries since Einstein. But, it won’t be supported by US technology. Those won’t be US technicians running and maintaining the equipment. They won’t be US grounds keepers and janitors and administrative assistants, security personnel, and facilities managers, supply chain experts, contractors, painters, plumbers, and technical publications. It won’t be US grocery stores and markets around the facility. Shall I go on? Those are not US jobs and it is not US technology.
You can argue about cost. You can wage politics. But, there’s no arguing that fundamental technology is being driven out of the US. Our public policies are creating high-paying and high-benefit government jobs and a slew of short-term minimum-wage jobs. We are salvaging our bulging banks and ballooning our service companies instead of starting the technology engines that generate real jobs and keep them coming in the future. We are killing our technology and throwing out the babies (yes, with the bath water).
The Tevatron is just the latest example. I can only pray that it never rests in peace.