Quote:
Originally posted by OnyxCougar
But there's already a supercollider.
Why build another one of those and have two of the same thing, when they can build it, and we can build the ISS? Then we have one of each.
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*They* are the Europeans who, as the NY Times article notes, will be prospering at the expense of America. Second, they are not building Cern. Cern is a smaller existing ring being converted because America is cutting back on science (where did the World Wide Web came from?) Many types of colliders are possible. I have forgotten the two most promising particles that could be collided. But Cern is being converted to smash the same type of particles that the super collider should have been smashing years ago. Furthermore, the TX supercollider was to have energy levels necessary to meet current science experiments; energy levels that will not be available at Cern.
IOW we had the option of remaining the world leaders in fundamental particle research and therefore the first potential beneficary of those breakthrough technologies. Instead we paid 10+ times more for an ISS that does no science. Therein lies the problem. As the NY Times article notes, America is becoming so scientifically naive as to not even understand what the super collider could have accomplished AND what the ISS really does (nothing).
I would suspect that many here only just learned what happens inside a fuel cell in this thread - the breakdown of an atom into leptons and baryons. Fuel cells, supercondutivity, and yes even the recent Intel press release about a breakthrough in high-K materials to replace sillicon dioxide - all involve sub atomic concepts.
But ISS must be more valuable? After all that is outer space! .... Doing what? It's not doing any science which is why the Columbia was not be retired. Only manned research being done in space were in those science modules put inside the space shuttle. And the more productive science is found in unmanned space craft such as Hubble, Soho, Pioneer, Mars Landers, Venus flybys, etc. Again, too many instead have the science knowledge found in a Leno piece called "Jay Walking".