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The Origin Story for the Blog
I am telling the reader this story in the hope of impelling him or her to find their own story and start a wordpress blog. We all have a story. Find yours.
The oldest post I can find for this blog is From FermiLab Today: Tevatron is Done at the End of 2011 (but I am not sure if that is the first post, just the oldest I could find.)
But the origin goes back to 1985, Timothy Ferris Creation of the Universe PBS, November 20, 1985, available in different videos on YouTube; The Atom Smashers, PBS Frontline November 25, 2008, centered at Fermilab, not available on YouTube; and The Big Bang Machine, with Sir Brian Cox of U Manchester and the ATLAS project at the LHC at CERN.
In 1993, our idiot Congress pulled the plug on The Superconducting Super Collider, a particle accelerator complex under construction in the vicinity of Waxahachie, Texas. Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometers (54.1 mi) with an energy of 20 Tev per proton and was set to be the world’s largest and most energetic. It would have greatly surpassed the current record held by the Large Hadron Collider, which has ring circumference 27 km (17 mi) and energy of 13 TeV per proton.
If this project had been built, most probably the Higgs Boson would have been found there, not in Europe, to which the USA had ceded High Energy Physics.
(We have not really left High Energy Physics. Most of the magnets used in The LHC are built in three U.S. DOE labs: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Also, see below. the LHC based U.S. scientists at Fermilab and Brookhaven Lab.)
I have recently been told that the loss of support in Congress was caused by California pulling out followed by several other states because California wanted the collider built there.
The project’s director was Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Louis Ianniello served as its first Project Director for 15 months. The project was cancelled in 1993 due to budget problems, cited as having no immediate economic value.
Some where I learned that fully 30% of the scientists working at CERN were U.S. citizens. The ATLAS project had 600 people at Brookhaven Lab. The CMS project had 1,000 people at Fermilab. There were many scientists which had “gigs” at both sites.
I started digging around in CERN web sites and found Quantum Diaries, a “blog” from before there were blogs, where different scientists could post articles. I commented on a few and my dismay about the lack of U.S recognition in the press.
Those guys at Quantum Diaries, gave me access to the Greybook, the list of every institution in the world in several tiers processing data for CERN. I collected all of their social media and was off to the races for CERN and other great basic and applied science.
Since then I have expanded the list of sites that I cover from all over the world. I build .html templates for each institution I cover and plop their articles, complete with all attributions and graphics into the template and post it to the blog. I am not a scientist and I am not qualified to write anything or answer scientific questions. The only thing I might add is graphics where the origin graphics are weak. I have a monster graphics library. Any science questions are referred back to the writer who is told to seek his answer from the real scientists in the project.
The blog has to date 900 followers on the blog, its Facebook Fan page and Twitter. I get my material from email lists and RSS feeds. I do not use Facebook or Twitter, which are both loaded with garbage in the physical sciences.
That is my Origin Story
Richard Mitnick
sciencesprings
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- The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH) ( 14 )
- The Geodetic Engineering Laboratory (Topo) within EPFL's School of Architecture; Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC). ( 1 )
- "The missing piece to faster and cheaper and more accurate 3D mapping" ( 1 )
- The work could be done five times faster based upon the work of Jan Skaloud Davide Cucci and Aurélien Brun. ( 1 )
- Applied Research & Technology ( 9,335 )
- Laser Technology ( 401 )
- Switzerland is currently mapping its entire landscape using airborne laser scanners – the first time since 2000. ( 1 )
- Three-dimensional (3D) mapping is a very useful tool. ( 1 )
- Peta Electron Volt particles ( 1 )
- "Pevatrons": cosmic particle accelerators ( 1 )
- Sky & Telescope ( 54 )
- The universe has no shortage of exceedingly energetic particles. They slam into Earth’s atmosphere all the time. ( 1 )
- Only recently has data begun to shed light on these energetic particles. ( 1 )
- "Seeing Inside a Cosmic Superaccelerator" ( 1 )
- Horizon - The EU Research and Innovation Magazine ( 30 )
- Climate Change; Global warming; Carbon Capture; Ecology ( 33 )
- In the interest of greater accuracy in the 1790s the French government commission standardized the metre as the basic unit of distance. ( 1 )
- "Nanometre scale": A nanometre is a billionth of a metre. ( 1 )
- Once the realm of research scientists nanoscales are increasingly important in industry. ( 1 )
- "AFMs": atomic force microscopes ( 1 )
- Nanotechnology ( 635 )
- "Metrology": the science of measurement ( 1 )
- "Cubit": Ancient measurement which was approximately the length of a forearm ( 1 )
- "The small things make a big difference in the science of measurement" ( 1 )
- The kilo; the ampere; the kelvin and the mole are now based on fundamental constants in nature instead of physical models. ( 1 )
- Since 2018 some key definitions of measurement units have been redefined. ( 1 )
- The Romans used fingers and feet in their measurement systems while the story goes that Henry I of England (c 1068 - 1135) tried to standardize a yard as the distance from his nose to his thumb. ( 1 )
- Clean Energy ( 278 )
- "Q&A- 'People have to be at the centre of the energy transformation' ( 1 )
- Nebojsa Nakicenovic: Vice-Chair- Group of Chief Scientific Advisors (GCSA) ( 1 )
- A group of UW students hiked up to one of Mount Baker’s most prominent glaciers-Easton Glacier-and learned how to gather highly precise data that can be used to track glacier change. ( 1 )
- It’s important to monitor glacier sites to understand the impacts of climate change. ( 1 )
- There’s an ideal way to learn about retreating glaciers: visit them for the day. ( 1 )
- There are things you experience when you are standing next to a glacier that you just can’t learn in a classroom. ( 1 )
- The University of Washington (US) Civil & Environmental Engineering ( 3 )
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