- Follow sciencesprings on WordPress.com
Tags
AAS NOVA Accelerator Science ALMA Applied Research & Technology Astrobites Astronomy Astrophysics Basic Research Biology Caltech Cancer CERN CERN LHC Chemistry Clean Energy Cosmology Dark Energy Dark Matter Earth Observation EarthSky Energy Eos ESA ESO - European Southern Observatory FNAL Geology HEP Laser Technology Material Sciences Medicine Millimeter/submillimeter astronomy MIT Nanotechnology NASA Chandra NASA ESA Hubble NASA JPL - Caltech Neutrinos Particle Accelerators Particle Physics phys.org 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
- Applied Research & Technology ( 8,335 )
- Chemistry ( 872 )
- Rice University (US) ( 8 )
- phys.org ( 692 )
- "Chemists discover mechanism in controlled growth of tetrahedron-shaped nanoparticles" ( 1 )
- Physics ( 2,408 )
- DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) ( 16 )
- "Experiments confirm a quantum material’s unique response to circularly polarized laser light" ( 1 )
- The central principle of superconductivity is that electrons form pairs. ( 1 )
- KTH Royal Institute of Technology [Kungliga Tekniska högskolan](SE) ( 2 )
- Can electrons also condense into foursomes? ( 1 )
- "Experiments reveal formation of a new state of matter- Electron quadruplets" ( 1 )
- The pairing of electrons enables the quantum state of superconductivity-a zero-resistance state of conductivity-is used in MRI scanners and quantum computing. ( 1 )
- Basic Research ( 14,078 )
- "Scientists Need Your Help in Identifying New Exoplanets Out in Space" ( 1 )
- Exoplanet research ( 104 )
- Science Alert (US) ( 36 )
- "Infant Planet Discovered by UH-Led Team Using Maunakea Telescopes" ( 1 )
- Astrophysics ( 7,378 )
- Optical Astronomy ( 106 )
- W.M. Keck Observatory (US) ( 12 )
- The planet 2m0437 ( 1 )
- Cosmology ( 7,538 )
- "Controlling Light with a Material Three Atoms Thick" ( 1 )
- Most of us control light all the time without even thinking about it usually in mundane ways. ( 1 )
- Scientists thanks to a new breakthrough that uses a specialized material only three atoms thick they can control light more precisely than ever before. ( 1 )
- The material is constructed from so-called black phosphorous which is similar in many ways to graphite or graphene. ( 1 )
- Light exists as a wave and has a property known as polarization. ( 1 )
- Scientists say the technology could also open the door to a light-based replacement for Wi-Fi. ( 1 )
- Polarization can be useful because it allows light to be controlled in specific ways. ( 1 )
- California Institute of Technology (US) ( 29 )
- "A day in the life of an ALMA astronomer" ( 1 )
- ESOblog (EU) ( 20 )
- ALMA ( 344 )
- ESO - European Southern Observatory ( 227 )
Reply