This would have created a strong science hub and community in Texas, a real reason for the state to be proud of itself, looking towards the future like it did in the 1960s, and that was due to the Democrats with LBJ.
Now instead, they got assault rifle-totin’, shit-kicking knuckle-draggers for life, as the whole place builds up inertia sinking into a festering swamp of its’ own ignorance.
There would have been t-shirts
EVERYTHING’S BIGGER IN TEXAS
INCLUDING SUPERCOLLIDERS
Would we have never heard the end of republicans bitching and whining about the cost and “our taxpayer dollars” and all that idiocy?
Who knows, considering Texan lawmakers carry an outsized weight in the republican party, and this project meant thousands upon thousands of skilled, high-paying jobs, including creating large new communities populated by scientists from all over the world.
Then after beating CERN to the punch to first detect the Higgs Boson, they would have draped themselves in the flag while chanting USA, USA, USA…
But ignorance and myopia are the horses pulling the republican cart.
well i mean to be fair, it was also on a really big boon of massive military spending, and the debt was a significant problem, plus this was like a fucking massive collider for the time, and probably even now.
The sheer cost alone of it i think was like 20 billion dollars near the tail end of development, not to mention they had basically redesigned the entire fucking thing by that point since they had dropped an entire team. It was a fucking mess.
yeah unfortunately the public and government just weren’t very perceptive to a massive scientific project which would almost certainly many times overrun the budget outlined for it. Socioeconomics are hard…
You are asking something different, but I think it’s interesting to mention that the particles that go into the LHC don’t start there. The LHC gets them from the SPS, which gets them from the PS and this keeps going for a few more steps.
Colliders work best at specific speeds, like gears on a car. The big collider is fed by a smaller one. That one is likely fed by an even smaller one. Eventually, you get small enough that a simple linear accelerator can get the gas up to speed.
Oh, and likely a scientist/engineer grinning manically as they “push the trigger” on the largest rail gun in existence.
I feel like this should be required watching for anyone who wants to better understand colliders and the politics around them. BobbyBroccoli made this series on the development of some of them.
Also that West Wing episode where a physicist is trying to get funding for our Collider and the staffer is like “what does it do? What practical applications does it have?” and the physicist says none. It’s practical application is discovery. That we discovered penicillin on accident not when we were researching practical applications of injections.
Ok, that I didn’t know. Off to find some references.
(I have fairly strong opinions about people like that. Hell, I refuse to watch any Tom Cruise movies because of his association with scientology, just as an example.)
Absolutely horrendous. I stopped watching her after that. I don’t care if it was good intentioned or not, she obviously should have expanded her understanding of the topic before presenting herself as an expert on it, and that makes me wonder how many other topics she covers in this way.
I didn’t see that one on her view of trans people, but her recent one on nuclear power was nearly biased and selective enough to be called “disinformation”.
Honestly the intro of it was enough for me to click out of it initially. She says
On the one side you have people claiming that it’s a socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate your innocent children. On the other side there are those saying that it’s saving the lives of minorities who’ve been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people, like you and I, who think both sides are crazy and could someone please summarise the facts in simple words, which is what I’m here for.
As a cis-man, I detest the notion that wanting trans people to have access to healthcare and equal human rights to the rest of us is in any way “crazy.”
She further goes on to cite a disputed article in an open-access journal regarding rapid-onset gender dysphoria from a known biased source as though it carries actual weight.
The article in question basically claims that rapid-onset gender dysphoria is an actual phenomenon because the author polled parents of children on a transphobic forum, about whether or not the child “becoming trans” was a sudden event. There are multiple problems with this
The parents are the source of supposed truth
The parents likely have an inherent bias (being that they are on a transphobic forum)
It is possible - and in my opinion - plausible that the parents experience it as having a “rapid onset” because the children spent a lot of time hiding this aspect of themselves from the parents because the parents express LGBT+ phobic views. I concealed many parts of my personality from my abusive mother, and I know several trans people who didn’t come out to their parents until such a time they felt it safe to do so.
From the parents perspective their kid moved out (e.g. to uni) and spontaneously changed gender from one day to the next, but at that stage their friends had been referring to them by their chosen names and pronouns for years.
This is what I took away from it as well. The fact that she so readily quoted really biased and disputed articles and presented them as though they carried as much weight as the actual science sat really wrong with me. She clearly didn’t spend very long looking into the articles she presented.
It makes me think of LLMs, really. She talks with authority about a lot of subjects, but ultimately she’s a physicist. Sure, she’s scientifically literate and that can be used to make sense of articles and studies in other disciplines, at least to an extent. However, it doesn’t make her an authority in any of those disciplines. Then there’s the time constraint to keep in mind as well; she might be able to analyse the literature and give a sensible take on the matter, but not when her schedule involves making one ~5 minute video on any given topic per day.
The titles on some of her videos manage to be too fishy for my taste, they appear a lot on my feed due to watching a lot of videos from channels like PBS Spacetime and The History Of The Universe, stuff like that.
You can tell that she knows her stuff, but clickbait titles somewhat like, I paraphrase here: “A year ago I lost my faith in science, here’s why”, raise my suspicions and I move on without clicking. Right on the blurry edge between science and something else beyond that line, something that’s not quite legit and not good for you.
Same for me. I had watched one video of hers because I watch those same channels and afterwards i looked her up and saw the controversial shit. The clickbait doesn’t help her image either. Hard pass for me.
This is the conversation I needed to finally block (or “not recommend”, or whatever YouTube calls it) her videos on my feed.
Astrum also sometimes gives me an uneasy feeling, but so far the content appears to be solid, although I don’t watch all his videos.
Hey, let me recommend one of the best channels out there in the vast sea of science/history YouTube content, the name is ParallaxNick.
He’s been doing incredibly well-research videos on the history of astronomy, recently he’s been doing a series that went into detail on Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Galileo, I suspect (fingers crossed tight) he’s gonna follow with Newton, then Huygens, Halley and the Herschels.
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