Saturday, September 11, 2010

Competition vs Collaboration

There was a recent discussion in the high energy physics community whether to run Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois. It is said that many top scientists including Nobel Laurette are suggesting an extension of another three years after the proposed shutdown in 2011. People are saying that Tevatron is not dead yet and it still has a great potential to search the Higgs boson. I agree upto this point. But I found some comments like this also : "Fermilab researchers have a chance to see the Higgs boson first because the more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, is running years behind schedule and is going to be shut for around 15 months in 2012 for some repair work". I do not understand the meaning of competing with the CERN. After all, LHC is an international collaboration and the US is also contributing to it. Running Tevatron for another three years is a good thing provided it has a potential to discover some new physics beyond the standard model, like it has recently seen some dimuon asymmetry which is 3.2 sigma away from standard model predictions. But the motive to run the Tevatron should not be just to compete with CERN. We should compete with Nature to unfold her secrets, (no matter how hard She tries to hide them) rather than spending billion dollars just to compete amongst ourselves specially during a time when there is a crisis in the global economy. We should also save some money to build the proposed ILC (International Linear Collider) which is supposed to confirm whatever LHC finds :)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Its always good to read your blog. But this make me feel as if I am intruding into your peripheral without your permission. Pls pardom me for this.


Btw ...You seems to be a person of great intellect and thoughts with the deep knowledge of subject.

Quark said...

Thanks a lot. Feel free to share your views and opinions. Although I pursue blogging as a hobby and least concerned about who reads it or not, still it feels great to see that someone has found it interesting.

Kaushik said...

ILC is going to verify ? I thought ILC will "measure" whatever LHC discovers (if anything :P )

Quark said...

yeah I meant that only actually..verify is not the proper word. ILC gonna be a precision measurement machine. But suppose LHC predicts some new particles and the observed signal was a human error. I don't know if ILC will be able to correct it or not. If it can, it would also verify the LHC results.