Amid all the stupidity, waste, and madness taking up so much of our collective energy there are still noble elements of our species creating works like this: The CERN Large Hadron Super-Collider, the world’s largest scientific instrument — a nuclear particle accelerator in a 17-mile tunnel near the Swiss-French border.
The European Union, Japan, and the USA kick in just under a billion a year (y’know, about the cost of FIVE DAYS IN IRAQ!) in order to allow the smartest people on the planet to lower the collider temperature to absolute zero and shoot protons at other protons at the speed of light.
Don’t ask me how, but this will enable them to learn more about the nature of the matter that makes up you, me, your pets and every other thing in the Universe.
Now the funny thing is we could have been doing all this in Texas except that in 1993 the Yoo-Knighted States Kongris decided that they didn’t want to fund this egg-head stuff that might explain the origins of the Universe without so much as a nod to Our Sweet Lord Jesus.
And just like after the more recent Bush/GOP decision to banish stem cell research from our shores to show how much they loved babies, even the kind with only a dozen cells to their name, The Brains and The Money went elsewhere and now all we can do is look and applaud politely when the Nobels, the Patents, and oh my, that darn Money again (!) all congregate under flags not our own.
Sorry, hadn’t meant to rant. This is still far more silver-lining than cloud. I just can’t help but imagine how much further along we’d be if the idiots and their flock weren’t holding us back so badly.
Dead Yahoo link. Happens so fast now.