Fermilab has been in trouble for a while. They did not diversify enough at the tail end of Tevatron and (I think) are mostly working on DUNE, which isn’t going great. You can’t have a lab that big with mostly a singular focus which is being executed poorly.
Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
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Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#12This makes me sad.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and got accepted into the Saturday Morning Physics Program (https://saturdaymorningphysics.fnal.gov/) at Fermilab. Many of the lectures went completely over my head at the time but I was still in awe of the particle accelerator on campus. I actually got lost driving to a different building one Saturday and accidentally drove around the ring (with several people blindly following me). Their neutrino experiment, which was planned to shoot neutrinos to Minnesota (MINOS program), was on the imminent horizon and the staff were excited... apparently that was ended in 2016.
I guess it's a hard life being known for a particle accelerator when you get dethroned by CERN and then shut down your ring.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
One man's junk is another man's treasure.
So the adage goes but sometimes one man's junk just becomes another person's hoarding.
Yeah. I've gotten pretty good but still have some old electronics and computer-related stuff in my attic that I have no real reason to hold onto but have no interest in going to the trouble of finding someone to take it off my hands and probably basically hoard it.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#14Some categories shouldn't be privatized like medicine, military arms, basic science, road maintenance, and emergency rescue operations. Elon isn't going to work on particle physics without a direct commercial purpose.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#15> However, Fermilab may not deserve all the blame, says a theoretical physicist who requested anonymity to protect relations with DOE. For example, he says, after the lab finally hammered out an excavation contract with Thyssen Mining, months passed before DOE approved it. “I’m not sure whether it’s really the lab that has a problem, or if it’s DOE that has a problem and is blaming the lab.” If you need anonymity to…
> If you need anonymity to talk to a reporter, you already know that DOE has a problem.
I know nothing of the issues going on but this just isn't a universal truth. Most people would speak anonymously when talking about their employer and that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with their employer.
Which employers allow their employees to speak poorly of them in public without permission to speak about the company?
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#16One of my great joys as a teenager exploring electronics was the opportunity to clean out an old storage closet at some Fermilab facility with a friend. This was in the late 80s, we got several 1950s oscilloscopes and much other gear of similar era. The room had been overlooked in the usual surplus process for years. My friend was related to someone working for the janitorial services company, and they'd been told to…
This is tangential at best but I was in Chicago,US once for a business trip and we had weekends off so we did some sight-seeing and one Sunday late afternoon we were close to Fermilab so we decided to take a look.
The building was empty but open, there's a museum upstairs but when we got lost between floors we would just walk between cubicles that were clearly in use during the week, it was super wierd and cool at the same time. We didn't see the accelerator of course but still, we saw some control rooms etc..., to this day I'm not sure if we broke in or what
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#17Fermilab has been in trouble for a while. They did not diversify enough at the tail end of Tevatron and (I think) are mostly working on DUNE, which isn’t going great. You can’t have a lab that big with mostly a singular focus which is being executed poorly.
Your comment reminded me of a Youtube documentary about "the missing American particle collider"[0]. The documentary touches on some Fermilab drama, but most of the content is aimed at politics (and in particular, how presidential politics is unfortunately intertwined with funding for science mega-projects in the US).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivVzGpznw1U&list=PLAB-wWbHL7...
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#18Some categories shouldn't be privatized like medicine, military arms, basic science, road maintenance, and emergency rescue operations. Elon isn't going to work on particle physics without a direct commercial purpose.
"Road maintenance" shouldn't be done by private companies that are given contracts by the government? Why not?
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#19Some categories shouldn't be privatized like medicine, military arms, basic science, road maintenance, and emergency rescue operations. Elon isn't going to work on particle physics without a direct commercial purpose.
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Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#20Some categories shouldn't be privatized like medicine, military arms, basic science, road maintenance, and emergency rescue operations. Elon isn't going to work on particle physics without a direct commercial purpose.
Private does not mean for-profit. Funding and performance are two different things. Road construction is funded by government, but performed by private companies.