Land Of Big Science

The Large Hadron Collider is a symptom of America's decline in particle physics and, some fear, in science overall.
By Fred Guterl, William Underhill and Sarah Garland | NEWSWEEK
Published Sep 6, 2008

The eyes of the world are on Geneva, where scientists are expected to throw the switch this week on what may be the biggest experiment ever conducted. It's certainly the most expensive. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has spent roughly $8 billion digging a 27-kilometer tunnel on the outskirts of the city and filling it with equipment that pushes the limits of technology—superconducting magnets that operate at close to absolute zero, the temperature at which atoms cease all movement, and can accelerate particles to energies not seen for 14 billion years, and instruments that can detect faint whispers of particles far smaller than atoms.

Probing more deeply than ever before into the stuff of the universe requires some big hardware. It also requires the political will to lavish money on a project that has no predictable practical return, other than prestige and leadership in the branch of science that delivered just about every major technology of the past hundred years.

Those advances came, in large measure, from the United States. The coming decades may be different. The Large Hadron Collider, as the Geneva machine is called, is a symptom of America's decline in particle physics and Europe's rise. Many scientists and educators fear that it also signals a broader decline in scientific leadership on the part of the United States.


The LHC has transformed Geneva into something of a scientific mecca. According to CERN, more than 9,000 scientists have been working on the project, not only from nearby Europe but from countries as diverse as India, Russia, Japan, Israel and Turkey. Over the next few decades, they'll continue to arrive by train and by plane, stay in hotels and eat in restaurants, occasionally dangling their feet in the fountains of Lausanne. Not being a particularly freewheeling bunch, they will spend most of their time in the lab, relishing the data that will soon start pouring out of the instrument like a desert spring. Some will choose to live nearby—in Geneva, or perhaps France and Britain. Although particle physics is hardly a key driver of great economies, it is the most profound of intellectual challenges, embracing the most fundamental contradictions in science and attracting some of the best minds.

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Well, Europe, you keep doing those egghead thingies! Our Priorities are in more manly stuff, like blowing up shit and killing people.

Talking Heads › The Big Country (5:17)

I see the shapes,
I remember from maps.
I see the shoreline.
I see the whitecaps.
A baseball diamond, nice weather down there.
I see the school and the houses where the kids are.
Places to park by the factries and buildings.
Restaunts and bar for later in the evening.
Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas.
And I have learned how these things work together.
I see the parkway that passes through them all.
And I have learned how to look at these things and I say,

(chorus)

I wouldnt live there if you paid me.
I couldnt live like that, no siree!
I couldnt do the things the way those people do.
I couldnt live there if you paid me to.

I guess its healthy, I guess the air is clean.
I guess those people have fun with their neighbors and friends.
Look at that kitchen and all of that food.
Look at them eat it guess it tastes real good.

They grow it in the farmlands
And they take it to the stores
They put it in the car trunk
And they bring it back home
And I say ...

(chorus)

I say, I wouldnt live there if you paid me.
I couldnt live like that, no siree!
I couldnt do the things the way those people do.
I wouldnt live there if you paid me to.

Im tired of looking out the windows of the airplane
Im tired of travelling, I want to be somewhere.
Its not even worth talking
About those people down there.

Goo goo ga ga ga
Goo goo ga ga ga