-
From Science Magazine: “Tiny diamond mirrors could smooth out already revolutionary x-ray lasers” » Magnets called undulators stretch roughly 100 meters down a tunnel at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with one side (right) producing hard x-rays and the other soft x-rays.Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
richardmitnick
- Follow sciencesprings on WordPress.com
Tags
"phys.org" 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 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 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
- DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory ( 10 )
- X-ray Technology ( 397 )
- Nanotechnology ( 638 )
- Laser Technology ( 404 )
- Basic Research ( 14,733 )
- "YBCO": yttrium barium copper oxide ( 1 )
- Physics ( 2,706 )
- Applied Research & Technology ( 9,342 )
- Supercomputing ( 356 )
- These LCLS experiments generated terabytes of data-a challenge for processing. ( 1 )
- "CDWs": charge density waves-ripples in the density of electrons in the material ( 1 )
- "Superconductivity and charge density waves caught intertwining at the nanoscale" ( 1 )
- Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago as a result of a violent process where thousands of baby planets over 100 kilometers (62 miles) in size collided. ( 1 )
- "How Uranus and Neptune are key to unlocking how planets form" ( 1 )
- The formation of the ice giants is pressing because their noble gases are the most unaltered reflections of the planet-forming materials in the early outer solar disk. ( 1 )
- Sending spacecraft to Jupiter [Juno] and Saturn [Cassini] has already proved to be world-changing — literally. ( 1 )
- The 2023-2032 Planetary Science Decadal Survey recommends sending a spacecraft to Uranus as the highest priority. ( 1 )
- Figuring out the origin of ice giants is key to understanding not only our own solar system but countless others across the galaxy. ( 1 )
- Scientists think our water likely came during a brief period roughly 4 billion years ago when large asteroids and comets bombarded Earth. ( 1 )
- The discoveries at Saturn and Jupiter have led scientists to think that Uranus and Neptune might also have large diluted cores. ( 1 )
- China is considering a Voyager-like mission to interstellar space that would launch in 2024 and fly past Neptune in 2038. ( 1 )
- Scientists have endorsed that NASA undertakes a flagship mission to Uranus. ( 1 )
- The Planetary Society ( 7 )
- Scientists think early Earth would’ve lost most of its water to space due to high heat. ( 1 )
- In the best-case scenario a mission to Uranus could launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in 2031 or 2032 and reach Uranus 12 to 13 years later. ( 1 )
- Since Jupiter and Saturn were the first and most massive planets to form they gobbled up most of the outer solar disk’s hydrogen and helium. ( 1 )
- Planetary Science ( 188 )
- ESA is also considering a Uranus orbiter mission. ( 1 )
- Neptune and Uranus are the least-explored planets of our solar system. ( 1 )
- With piezoelectric materials one can convert mechanical energy into electrical energy and vice versa. ( 1 )
- The path to discovering a new mechanism began with a question: What factors control the magnitude of piezoelectric constant? ( 1 )
- "Ultrahigh piezoelectric performance demonstrated in ceramic materials" ( 1 )
- The scientists used a combination of different modeling techniques: chemical heterogeneity and anisotropy. ( 1 )
- These findings have the potential to lead to improved and even novel piezoelectric materials. ( 1 )
- The Pennsylvania State University ( 4 )
sciencesprings 
Reply