This Week's Real Celebration...
Contrary to popular belief today's fireworks are nowhere near the United States. They're in Geneva.
Today, if you're reading any news at all that is actually news (as opposed to pop culture Justin Beiber/Lady Gaga drivel) CERN announced the discovery of a Higgs-like boson. Is this news to you? If so, Google it. I'll wait while you deal with your embarrassment.
I am highly, highly honored to be able to count as a friend one of the particle physicists on the CERN team - Dr. Seth Zenz. One of my mentors once said to me that one of the secrets to success is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are. Seth is one of those folks for me.
My best congratulations to the CERN team on the beginning of a long and great research road. What has been announced today, and what will be coming down the pike, will have profound implications for all of us in the decades and centuries to come - things that 99% of us will never be able to appreciate and understand. Fortunately for us, there are people that do.
And today, honestly, while I stand proud at what was a great international achievement, that pride is tinged with just a bit of shame. This massive, massive discovery, and the work that was done to achieve it was done at CERN, Switzerland. But for the extreme short-sightedness our leaders, and I'm ashamed to say, our culture, this work and this discovery could have been done here, in the United States. Fermilab was one of the potential sites for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but no, we couldn't come up with the money. Even worse, Fermilab's largest accelerator, the Tevatron, was shut down on September 30, 2011 due to lack of funding.
This is yet another example of the significant loss of leadership of the United States in the world since the 70s, a slide that history says we'll never recover from.
Today, if you're reading any news at all that is actually news (as opposed to pop culture Justin Beiber/Lady Gaga drivel) CERN announced the discovery of a Higgs-like boson. Is this news to you? If so, Google it. I'll wait while you deal with your embarrassment.
I am highly, highly honored to be able to count as a friend one of the particle physicists on the CERN team - Dr. Seth Zenz. One of my mentors once said to me that one of the secrets to success is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are. Seth is one of those folks for me.
My best congratulations to the CERN team on the beginning of a long and great research road. What has been announced today, and what will be coming down the pike, will have profound implications for all of us in the decades and centuries to come - things that 99% of us will never be able to appreciate and understand. Fortunately for us, there are people that do.
And today, honestly, while I stand proud at what was a great international achievement, that pride is tinged with just a bit of shame. This massive, massive discovery, and the work that was done to achieve it was done at CERN, Switzerland. But for the extreme short-sightedness our leaders, and I'm ashamed to say, our culture, this work and this discovery could have been done here, in the United States. Fermilab was one of the potential sites for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but no, we couldn't come up with the money. Even worse, Fermilab's largest accelerator, the Tevatron, was shut down on September 30, 2011 due to lack of funding.
This is yet another example of the significant loss of leadership of the United States in the world since the 70s, a slide that history says we'll never recover from.