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The Discovery of the Top Quark |
Fermilab's Tevatron is
shutdown.
Accelerators can, and do, have useful afterlives, giving rise to all kinds of valuable spinoff technologies with the potential to make our world a better place; the Tevatron will be no exception.
But that's not, ultimately, why we do the kind of fundamental, curiosity-driven physics research for which the accelerator is justly famed. And with its passing, a little bit more of that bold frontier spirit passes with it.
We've ceded the territory of high-energy particle physics to the Europeans and the LHC. Like the end of the Space Shuttle program, we're all a little less today than we were yesterday, a little more provincial, a little bit closer to obsolescence in the world of basic science.
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