Comment by colechristensen

12 hours ago

Plenty of things get discovered all over the world and this isn't a particularly earth shattering result. Discovering evidence of a particle predicted for 50 years is interesting but still pretty mundane.

The LHC which is doing much of the particle physics discovery is in Switzerland and France, if you need to be reminded, not the US.

The first strong force theory was published by Hideki Yukawa in Japan in 1935 (which won him the nobel prize) ... so uh, not exactly a sputnik problem.

Sputnik problems (and the nuclear race) are engineering and industrial races, not fundamental physics ones.

5 comments

colechristensen

Reply
lukeify  7 hours ago

> The LHC which is doing much of the particle physics discovery is in Switzerland and France, if you need to be reminded, not the US.

Which is ironically an example of particle collider science happening overseas primarily because the US relinquished its lead on scientific discovery, despite having a similar-scale particle collider practically finished and ready to go [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

  • voidUpdate  5 hours ago

    "practically finished and ready to go" is a bit of an overstatement. They made some holes in the ground, and did preliminary research and manufacturing, but it was heavily mismanaged and fantastically over budget, so congress killed it

  • kakacik  5 hours ago

    That would be classical 80:20 or more like 90:10 rule, few kms of tunnels ain't close to delivery in any feasible way, just the first baby steps.

    The amount of continuous effort (and budget) that goes into just keeping CERN up and delivering is non-trivial. I live nearby and sometimes chat with folks working there (its >15,000 folks although not all do science).