George Bush and the Margins of Science
by Paul McGoldrick

George W. Bush and his cadre arguably did more in eight years to denigrate science than anybody since the Vatican, in league with the Inquisition, tried and convicted Galileo Galilei in 1633. 

Any funding for particle collisions was viciously attacked during those horrible eight years, while the administration continued to pursue policies that only led to the spread of AIDS in Africa despite vast sums of money being poured into the programs.

If funding had continued over those eight years, then the likes of Fermilab (Batavia, IL) and the Brookhaven National Laboratory (on Long Island) might have been well ahead of the Large Hadron Collider in the search for the Higgs Boson

Fortunately, both institutions have been the recipients of considerable funding by the Obama administration from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the so-called stimulus bill signed into law a year ago. It has put Fermilab back into the driving seat for at least a while. Despite limited funding, both US collider operations have shown some incredible results in recent years.

Brookhaven is rather different from Fermilab. Its collider – the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider – is all about smashing heavier, larger particles, and their latest achievement in the lab has been to produce temperatures greater than 4 trillion (10¹²)ºC during the collision of gold atoms traveling just below light speed.

This temperature was forty times that of a star’s center going supernova. The lab describes it as a quark soup of protons and gluons from the gold atoms melting into a plasma that they are calling Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP).

How do you measure temperatures of this order? It is rather akin to the changes you see as most materials heat up, particularly in color shifting; most of the techniques are derived from existing industrial conditions.

This plasma has not been seen since the big bang – approaching 14 billion years ago – where the plasma would have existed for microseconds. In the collider, however, the plasma existed for only 10^-21s.

There are plans afoot to upgrade the RHIC for better collision rates and to add better detection systems. Maybe, just maybe, a US facility will prove the existence of the Higgs Boson before the LHC really gets up to speed and its detectors get to be fine tuned to the areas it needs to be in.

Whatever does happen, just having a US Government that recognizes science is actually important; is a very welcome boon. Do you think we will ever see the day when the Bush administration turns around and publicly apologizes, just as the Vatican did in 2009?