What's New Friday February 20, 2009

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 20 Feb 09   Washington, DC

1. LHC: IT WAS MADE TO RUN AND THAT’S WHAT IT’S GONNA DO.
Clearly reluctant to shut the Large Hadron Collider down right after 
turning it on following lengthy repairs, CERN announced last Friday that 
the plan is to start the LHC up by the end of September and run all 
winter. To add a little show-biz to the turn-on, Tom Hanks has reportedly 
been asked to throw the switch.  Hanks, who played Robert Langdon in The 
DaVinci Code returns in the prequel, Angels and Demons, which was filmed 
in part at the LHC.  The first proton collisions will take place four or 
five weeks after turn-on.  Unlike the customary winter shutdown, the LHC 
will be kept running right through the winter.  Electricity in the winter 
months costs about 3 times as much as it does in June, adding $10M to the 
electric bill.  Could it be that the LHC finds itself in a race to 
discover the Higgs? 

2. TEVATRON: DELAYING RETIREMENT TO FIND THE HIGGS.
The economic downturn has a lot of people putting off retirement.  And so 
it is at Fermilab.  The LHC delay has given the Tevatron a shot at finding 
the Higgs first.  According to yesterday’s Science, Tevatron scientists 
think they may have the edge.  If its mass is somewhere around 165 GeV 
they should find it.  From a scientific standpoint, the best possible 
outcome is for both accelerators to find the Higgs, thus providing 
confirmation and making everyone happy.

3.  ISS NODE 3: HOW ABOUT UNITY, HARMONY AND ROBOTICALLY?  
The public is asked to pick a name for the third node of the International 
Space Station.  "The name should reflect the spirit of exploration and 
cooperation embodied by the space station and follow in the tradition set 
by Node 1-Unity and Node 2-Harmony."  Node 3 will house life support 
equipment like the unit that converts, uh, number one and number two to 
drinking water.  Six rectangular windows and a circular over-head (sic) 
window will provide an "unrivaled" view of Earth.  In fact, the ISS is 
unsuited for high-resolution observations: Earth is half in the dark and 
the center of gravity is constantly shifting due to rotating machinery and 
astronauts bumping around.  To always observe a full Earth in high 
resolution the observer must be a robot at the Lagrange-1 point.  Putting 
astronauts on space stations is like putting little human tellers inside 
ATM machines.  While we’re at it, we could hang people up all over the 
place to snap surveillance photos.  It would  provide full employment.

4.  STIMULUS: $21 BILLION OUT OF $787 BILLION FOR SCIENCE.  
If we got that big a fraction of the total federal budget we wouldn’t know 
how to spend it, and we may not know how to spend this.  It’s great news, 
but science can’t afford to screw up the allocation.  Initially the bill 
ignored NSF completely; it wasn’t the science lobbyists that got the 
numbers up, it was Republican Sen. Arlen Specter almost single handedly.  
(Sorry I was a little late but I was on the road.)

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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