- Follow sciencesprings on WordPress.com
Tags
"phys.org" AAS NOVA Accelerator Science ALMA Applied Research & Technology Astrobites Astronomy Astrophysics Basic Research Biology Cancer CERN CERN LHC Chemistry Clean Energy Cosmology Dark Energy Dark Matter Earth Observation EarthSky Eos ESA ESO - European Southern Observatory FNAL Fusion technology Geology HEP Laser Technology Material Sciences Medicine Millimeter/submillimeter astronomy MIT Nanotechnology NASA Chandra NASA ESA Hubble NASA JPL - Caltech Neutrinos Oceanography Particle Accelerators Particle Physics Physics Quantum Computing Quantum Mechanics Radio Astronomy Science Alert SLAC Supercomputing Symmetry Magazine Women in STEM X-ray TechnologyOrigin Story
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
Follow me on Twitter
My TweetsRecent tags
- Cosmology ( 8,006 )
- Astrophysics ( 7,878 )
- Ground based Millimeter/submillimeter astronomy ( 29 )
- Basic Research ( 14,942 )
- ALMA (CL) ( 15 )
- Black Hole science ( 73 )
- Ground based Optical Astronomy ( 127 )
- Ground based Radio Astronomy ( 60 )
- Space based X-ray Astronomy ( 57 )
- "H1821+243:: Chandra Shows Giant Black Hole Spins Slower Than Its Peers" ( 1 )
- NASA Chandra ( 388 )
- "BerkSEL": Berkeley Surface Emitting Laser ( 1 )
- Computer Sciences ( 3 )
- Berkeley engineers have created a new type of semiconductor laser that meets an elusive goal in optics: the ability to emit a single mode of light with the ability to scale up in size and power. ( 1 )
- The study’s results are particularly relevant to vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers [VCSELs] ( 1 )
- Applied Research & Technology ( 9,568 )
- Electrical Engineering ( 51 )
- Physics ( 2,780 )
- This new laser capability enables lasers to be more powerful and to cover longer distances for many applications. ( 1 )
- Optics ( 117 )
- Scanning electron micrography ( 1 )
- The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ( 12 )
- The membrane in the study had about 3000 holes but theoretically it could have been 1 million or 1 billon holes. ( 1 )
- Laser Technology ( 421 )
- Material Sciences ( 530 )
- A semiconductor membrane perforated with evenly spaced and same-sized holes functioned as a perfect scalable laser cavity. ( 1 )
- The laser emits a consistent single wavelength regardless of the size of the cavity. ( 1 )
- "New single-mode semiconductor laser delivers power with scalability" ( 1 )
- The ExaSMR team has adapted their algorithms and code to run on GPUs to realize an orders-of-magnitude increase in performance. ( 1 )
- Investing in computer design capability means we can better evaluate and refine the designs to come up with the most efficacious solutions. ( 1 )
- The proposed SMR designs are generally simpler and require no human intervention or external power or the application of external force to shut down. ( 1 )
- The DOE’s Exascale Computing Project ( 1 )
- Current advanced reactor design approaches leverage decades of experimental and operational experience with the US nuclear fleet. ( 1 )
- "ExaSMR Models Small Modular Reactors Throughout Their Operational Lifetime" ( 1 )
- ExaSMR integrates the most reliable and high-confidence numerical methods for modeling operational reactors. ( 1 )
sciencesprings 
Reply