American science wanes
September 10th, 2008As the LHC begins operations today, not only is this the beginning of an important and great experiment, it also marks the triumph of Europe over america in science.
As the world’s press is waxing lyrical about the LHC, no one is talking about the SSC, the Superconducting Super Collider, which was CANCELLED by Congress in 1993, because it was going to ‘cost too much money’.
The now abandoned SSC site in Texas
From Wikipedia:
Superconducting Super Collider
The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) is the name of a particle accelerator that was planned to be built mostly in Waxahachie, Texas. Its planned ring circumference is 87.1 km (54 miles) and an energy of 20 TeV per beam, potentially enough energy to create a Higgs boson, a particle predicted by the Standard Model, but not yet detected. The project’s director was Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University. The project was cancelled in 1993.[…]
Cancellation
During the design and the first construction stage, a heated debate ensued about the high cost of the project. In 1987, Congress was told the project could be completed for $4.4 billion, but by 1993 the cost projection exceeded $12 billion. An especially recurrent argument was the contrast with NASA’s contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), which was of similar amount.[citation needed] Critics of the project argued that the US could not afford both of them.
The project was canceled by Congress in 1993. Many factors contributed to the shutdown of the project, although different parties disagree on which contributed the most. They include rising cost estimates, poor management by physicists and Department of Energy officials, the end of the need to prove the supremacy of American science with the collapse of the Soviet Union, belief that many smaller scientific experiments of equal merit could be funded for the same cost, Congress’s desire to generally reduce spending, and the reluctance of Texas Governor Ann Richards [1] and President Bill Clinton, both Democrats, to support a project begun during the administrations of Richards’s Republican predecessor, Bill Clements, and Clinton’s Republican predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. However, in 1993, Clinton attempted to prevent the cancellation by requesting that Congress continue “to support this important and challenging effort” through completion because “abandoning the SSC at this point would signal that the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science…” [2]
The closing of the SSC held drastic ramifications for the southern part of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, and resulted in a mild recession made most evident in those parts of Dallas which lay south of the Trinity River.[3] At the time the project was cancelled, 22.5 km (14 miles) of tunnel and 17 shafts to the surface were already dug and nearly two billion dollars had already been spent on the massive facility.[4]
[…]
My emphasis.
They now use the site to film ‘B’ movies. ‘Universal Soldier: The Return’ was shot there.
In case you are retarded and need reminding, this is the same government that:
- Just approved the ‘socialist’ takeover of Freedie Mac and Fannie Mae for $100 billion
- Financed (bilaterally) the illegal mass murder fests known as ‘The Iraq War’, and ‘The War in Afganistan’ at a cost of 2.4 Trillion Dollars
- Continues to pay out on the ongoing Imperial american Army that costs One Trillion Dollars each and every year.
And that is just for starters.
The SSC was cancelled because its original budget of $2 billion went to $14 billion. They stopped digging when the allocated $2 billion ran out.
Apart from the arguments against stealing from individuals to finance these projects, which do you think is better, spending TRILLIONS of dollars on mass murder and empire building and maintenance, or planning and successfully finishing the greatest single scientific experiment in the history of man so far, and all the other soul and mind expanding experiments and voyages that man needs to do to remain human?
If money is going to be stolen for a task, its far better to use it for the LHC, the space station, the missing moon and mars bases, etc, in my humble opinion.
The cancellation of the SSC and the success of the LHC is another symptom of the end of america’s greatness. In the race to build a machine that can see where no man has even seen, they failed utterly, not because they did not have the technical skill, and not because they did not have the money, but because their culture is in steep decline.
This is a culture and government that prefers to murder, to shoot bullets at men rather than shoot particles in an experiment, or men to other planets. This is a government that boasts that it has made the greatest leap forward…in how to murder people (a closely guarded secret):
while europe finances and creates the LHC, and will release the results immediately to benefit the world. And then there are the spinoff technologies of the grid computing that will eventually be made available to the public.
Europe, for all its flaws, is ascending, and america is sinking. There is no doubt about it.
america’s priorities are completely backward, the world is openly laughing at them, berating them, loathing them and their insane, pointless, inhuman warmongering and habitual irrational lying:
See Daniel Fried lie and start twitching as he does so. Pathetic and revolting in equal measure.
But I digress.
Let’s see who paid what to make this magic happen:
Cost
The total cost of the project is anticipated to be between €3.2 to €6.4 billion.[1] The construction of LHC was approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss francs (€1.6 billion), with another 210 million francs (€140 million) towards the cost of the experiments. However, cost over-runs, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around 480 million francs (€300 million) for the accelerator, and 50 million francs (€30 million) for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN’s budget, pushed the completion date from 2005 to April 2007.[25] 180 million francs (€120 million) of the cost increase have been due to the superconducting magnets. There were also engineering difficulties encountered while building the underground cavern for the Compact Muon Solenoid. In part this was due to faulty parts loaned to CERN by fellow laboratories Argonne National Laboratory or Fermilab.[26]
[…]
[…]
The CERN laboratory is supported by 14 European member states that provide financial contributions based on a complex formula involving the population and gross national product of each country.[…]
- Japan has already made a generous contribution of 5 billion Yen and relations between CERN and Japan are developing well (see next heading).
- An agreement was signed in March 1996 with India providing for a contribution to the LHC accelerator with a net value for CERN of $ 12.5 million.
- An agreement was signed with Russia in June 1996 which provides for a contribution to the LHC accelerator and detectors, each with net values for CERN of 67 million Swiss Francs.
- An agreement has been signed with Canada, allowing for an in-kind contribution to the LHC with a value of $ 30 million Canadian.
- As a result of the negotiations which have taken place with CERN and US officials, Council approved the text of a cooperation agreement outlining a contribution to the LHC accelerator from the Department of Energy (DOE) and a contribution from the DOE and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to the ATLAS and CMS experiments, totalling $530 million.
[…]
This further demonstrates the priorities of the mass murdering empire builders…not that we really require further proof. Japan donates $5 BILLION, america, $500,000. Even India managed to donate $12.5 million, and they have alot of domestic problems to see to.
This is the true measure by which we can assess the decline of america.
We should take heart that at least somewhere in the world, the true human spirit is alive and well. China is taking steps to get into space in a significant way, even India with its tight belt is pointing in the right direction…it looks like america has seen its best days…unless they decide to pull out and share their REAL secret weapon, and we all know what that is, and where its kept. Even if they did, it would not be something that they made out of a pure heart, but something they stole.
File under ‘how the mighty fall’.
UPDATE!
An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.
The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will “be the least significant” asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because “nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.”
Fingar’s remarks last week were based on a partially completed “Global Trends 2025” report that assesses how international events could affect the United States in the next 15 to 17 years. Speaking at a conference of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Fingar gave an overview of key findings that he said will be presented to the next occupant of the White House early in the new year.
“The U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished,” Fingar said, according to a transcript of the Thursday speech. He saw U.S. leadership eroding “at an accelerating pace” in “political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas.”
[…]
From every angle, its over.