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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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- Many colleagues tend to favour supernova remnants but experiments have so far failed to provide unambiguous proof that this is the case. ( 1 )
- Cosmic rays were discovered by the Austrian physicist Victor Franz Hess. ( 1 )
- Theoretical investigations have not yet succeeded in providing convincing evidence that particles in supernova remnants can be accelerated to the extremely high energy levels found in cosmic rays. ( 1 )
- In her work at FAU Dr. Mitchell now hopes to provide the anticipated experimental proof that protons are accelerated by pulsars and the area around them. ( 1 )
- It was only proven in 2019 that pulsar wind nebulas are capable of accelerating positrons and electrons to energy levels of 1015 electron volts. ( 1 )
- "Are pulsars the source of galactic cosmic rays?" ( 1 )
- Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg [FAU] (DE) ( 3 )
- As photons-or light particles-are created during the acceleration process gamma rays can also provide clues to the nature of cosmic accelerators. ( 1 )
- It is still not known where cosmic rays come from and whether they originate from one or several source populations. ( 1 )
- The most promising candidates include supernova remnants; the area around rotating neutron stars; or pulsars and black holes. ( 1 )
- Several research groups-for example in France; Poland and the USA-are working on theoretical models indicating that galactic cosmic rays originate in the area around pulsars. ( 1 )
- The University of Toronto (CA) ( 6 )
- "Groundbreakers: U of T’s Data Sciences Institute to help researchers find answers to their biggest questions" ( 1 )
- BBC UK ( 7 )
- "High-speed internet via airborne beams of light" ( 1 )
- NATURE ( 97 )
- "New type of dark energy could solve Universe expansion mystery" ( 1 )
- Stellar equilibrium: the outward radiation pressure from the sun’s internal fusion reactions exactly balances the inward push of the sun’s own gravity. ( 1 )
- "What are red giants?" ( 1 )
- A red giant is a star in its death stages. It has slowly swollen up to many times its original size. Once at the red giant stage a star might stay that way for up to a billion years. ( 1 )
- Our sun as an average star of its type was born with enough hydrogen to last for around 10 billion years. ( 1 )
- Stars that mostly burn hydrogen are in what’s known as the main-sequence phase. ( 1 )
- EarthSky ( 219 )
- Stars radiate energy by converting hydrogen to helium via nuclear fusion. ( 1 )
- It’s our sun’s destiny to become a red giant star (and afterwards a white dwarf and then a black dwarf) ( 1 )
- We call the current stage of our star’s life the hydrogen-burning phase because its energy source is the fusion of hydrogen atoms. But burning is a bit of a misnomer. It’s nuclear fusion not chemi ( 1 )
- Hydrogen: A star’s 1st fuel ( 1 )
- "BNL’s Zhangbu Xu and others prove 87-year-old theories of famous physicists" ( 1 )
- Vacuum birefringence ( 2 )
- Basic Research ( 13,986 )
- Physics ( 2,368 )
- This is the first experiment on Earth that demonstrates experimentally that polarization affects the interactions of light with the magnetic field in a vacuum. ( 1 )
- Breit and Wheeler suggested that colliding light particles could create pairs of electrons and their antimatter opposites known as positrons. ( 1 )
- DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (US) ( 28 )
- The spin measurement allows astrophysicists to test hypotheses about the nature of dark matter. ( 1 )
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