While undoubtedly there is truth to what the article says, America has been pretty fickle with science and is not footing enough of the bill this time around, it marginalizes the substantial contributions made by Americans on the CMS and Atlas detectors. I would argue that this is merely contributing to the current problem with American science rather than remedying it. Rather than understanding that a large portion of the data from the LHC WILL travel through American electronics, the average American will believe particle physics are for Europeans and that his nation is no longer on the cutting edge. This would discourage Americans from going into the field and cause them to consider it a lost cause. (yes it's an external problem)
The truth is that the American contribution to the project, while essential, has been largely ignored by the news media. (don't even ask me about the original quote. "essential, but limited" it can be taken several ways) An excellent example is the nice picture of the endcap muon systems on CMS that almost every news organization shows. Conspicuously absent is the fact that the vast majority ( chambers, electronics, and frame(I think the frame)) of this particular section was made and designed by Americans. Does essential, but limited mean that if the Americans got up and took away their electronics, the LHC wouldn't have a detector for another five to ten years?
My take on the project is that, while their contribution isn't what it should have been monetarily, the American contribution has been concentrated in strategic areas. This means that the actual American footprint on the project far exceeds their financial contribution.
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Not long ago the United States seemed certain to stay on top. In the 1980s and early 1990s, 30 kilometers of tunnel was dug in Waxahachie, Texas, south of Dallas, to house the Superconducting Supercollider—a machine that was to be much like the LHC, but bigger and more expensive. President Ronald Reagan, calling the project a "doorway to a new world," agreed to foot the $8.4 billion price tag without help from international partners. Physicists spent years designing experiments in hopes of grants and big discoveries. In 1993, with $2 billion spent and cost estimates swelling to $11 billion, the project came to an abrupt end. The U.S. Congress, worried about budget deficits, pulled the plug.
In Waxahachie, the partially dug tunnel was plugged and filled with water. The town looked into using the site for a prison, a movie studio and a counterterrorism training facility before selling it to the J.B. Hunt trucking company as a data-storage center. Those plans were put on hold when the owner, Johnnie Bryan Hunt, died. A cavernous, windowless building the size of several Wal-Marts now sits abandoned in a patch of weeds.
The loss of the collider demoralized scientists and probably contributed to the decline in the popularity of physics, which by one study is now as unpopular among university students as it was when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. The most worrying prospect is that scientists from other countries, who used to flock to the United States to be where the action is, are now heading to Europe instead. "Fewer students will come to the U.S.," says Peter Limon, a physicist at Fermilab in Illinois who is participating in a major LHC experiment. Fermilab's Tevatron, which until this week was the world's largest particle accelerator, has attracted Italian and Japanese scientists in particular, along with others from countries such as India. "They tend to stay. It is a major source of our intellectual ability in the United States," Limon says. "That will decrease."
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.
In Europe, by contrast, scientists can hardly contain their enthusiasm. "I can't remember a time in recent history when there has been so much coverage" of particle physics, says Ken Peach, director of the John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science at Oxford and London universities. "From the point of view of attracting the brightest and best, these [experiments] are genuine magnets. I talk to graduate students in Oxford and they are tense in a very real way. They want to get their hands on the data."
© 2008
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