Saudis to promote science

[A-1 (imported)]

Sorry, could not resist this:

Currently in the Texas

world their idea of education is memorising chunks of the Bible and accepting it uncritically. What sort of education is that? If they switch to studies of quantum physics, molecular biology, cosmoloy and other modern subjects they will learn more about God than they will from ancient texts.

Seeing that Texas' main business is energy, perhaps they will get the world's first fusion reactor to work and export electricity instead of oil. T

hat would be a greater gift to our planet than

Christian fundamentalism.

Having appologized, I wish them and all well. There is a huge amount of human intelligence and ingenuity that goes untapped because of religi

ous and cultural restraints. I am all for unleashing it.

HA!

FAT CHANCE!

The STUPID BASTARDS CANCELED IT YEARS AGO! (http://www.damninteresting.com/americas ... ercollider)

America’s Discarded Superconducting Supercollider

Written by Anthony Kendall on 18 April 2006

The N15 shaft of the Superconducting Supercollider tunnel Deep beneath the plains of central Texas lies a catacomb of tunnels once meant to house the most expensive physics experiment ever devised. That experiment, the Superconducting Supercollider, would have revolutionized our understanding of the physical world by giving us our first glimpse of the “God Particle.” And, proposed during the Cold War, it would have been a monument to the technological and scientific prowess of the Western world.

But in 1993 after investing over $2 billion dollars into the project, President Clinton and Congress cancelled it entirely. Highly sophisticated machinery and laboratories were simply sold to the highest bidder, and thousands of acres of empty land were parceled off and sold as well. All that now remains are 200,000 square feet of still-vacant factories and labs, and over 30 km of carved-rock tunnels slowly filling with water.

One of the most persistent mysteries of the Universe is why matter has mass at all. Physicists think they know the answer; a particle called the Higgs Boson, also called the “God Particle”, is thought to exist that gives all other particles mass. Around this theoretical particle they constructed the glittering edifice of late-20th century physics known rather plainly as the Standard Model.

Despite its tremendous importance, the Higgs has never been observed in experiments. According to calculations, it exists in detectable form only at astoundingly high temperatures and pressures – similar to those of the first few seconds after the Big Bang. Particle accelerators smash sub-atomic scraps together to regularly recreate such conditions, but none exists powerful enough to actually see the Higgs.

Frustrated by this problem, physicists petitioned the Department of Energy in the early 1980s to create the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. As its name suggests, the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) was to be enormous in every single way. It would slam particles together with more than 20 times the energy of any other existing or planned device. The beam of protons and anti-protons it would produce would be 100 times ‘brighter’ than even today’s most powerful accelerators. In order to control such tremendous energies, cutting-edge superconducting magnets would bend the beam around an oval-shaped beam tunnel more than 80 km in circumference.

Choosing the site for such an enormous facility was a country-wide effort involving geological and economic studies in 43 states. Though the process was a drawn-out political affair, the final choice seems a natural one; after all, everything’s bigger in Texas! The main accelerator ring would be bored through the bedrock 200 feet beneath Waxahachie, Texas. Sleepy Waxahachie would have been completely transformed by the SSC. Labs and factories were to be built nearby to produce the superconducting magnets and provide the above-ground facilities for the SSC’s considerable staff. Literally thousands of researchers, graduate students, and technicians would have been involved in running the machine and many would have been housed there.

Construction began in 1991, and by 1993 workers had dug over 30 km of tunnels. In order to bore through the sandstone and limestone beneath Waxahachie, a 15 foot diameter tunneling machine was created that literally chewed through the bedrock. Most of the ring tunnel would be a smooth-sided tube, but the giant particle detectors required cavernous galleries that had to be blasted out of the rock.

As work progressed on both the construction of the facilities and the design of the experiments themselves, expenses and projected costs rose precipitously. By 1993 the finished cost estimate was $8.25 billion; about the same as the projected cost of the International Space Station. Facing a bloating price tag on a program associated with his predecessor, President Clinton was never fond of the SSC. Without a presidential champion the deficit-weary Congress cut funding for the SSC entirely and chose to abandon the $2 billion that had already been spent.

A portion of the Superconducting Supercollider tunnelToday the failure of the SSC project continues to cast a long shadow on the physics community. Had it been fully funded, it would have begun experiments by the late 1990s and produced results around the turn of the millennium. The capabilities it would have afforded scientists are still unmatched, even by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland which will not be fully operational for another few years.

Some say that the days of big particle accelerators may be gone for good. Though there are still a number of accelerators in operation, and others in construction and planning, none will push forward the boundaries of physics research as the SSC would have. Meanwhile, the needs of high energy physicists have only grown. The latest theories, including string theory, require accelerator energies greater than even the SSC could have produced in order to test their predictions.

The one piece of the SSC program that could not be sold or auctioned may prove to be the silver lining in this tale. After all, the Earth changes slowly – far more slowly than the whims of government-funded science. Should Congress and the President ever decide to revive the SSC, the tunnels beneath Waxahachie will be waiting.

Called it a "PORK BARREL" project for Texas, more POLITICAL BULLSHIT!

[moi621 (imported)]

Islamic countries were indeed in a "Golden Age" as Spain before the Reconquista.

They absorbed libraries they conquered.

Not burn them

Then came the assaults, The Crusades from the West and Mongols from the East.

And Islam found itself the Poland of the World at that time. Its' solution was to become insulated from the outside world and their academic leadership crumbled, as they were under more theocratic control.

Their academic leadership included, chemistry, optics, mathematics, medicine, as well as maintain the books of the humanities as they had translated into Arabic. They may not have agreed but, studied. And that early attitude was lost.

It is part of their history. Maybe they will find a way to resurrect it.

[A-1 (imported)]

They had better start by shooting binLaden, then...

[Riverwind (imported)]

And it's only 25 years away.

Give or take oh 25 years or so.

Its a wonderful idea, one that is only 25 years away, WIND power is here now, along with solar, so what should we put our money in? I know OIL. yes drill baby drill, don't worry about safety, what could go wrong?

25 years you say?

RIGHT

River

[gareth19 (imported)]

“Roger Highfield, editor, New Scientist magazine writes

From the empire of Islam came the astrolabe, algebra and the collective wisdom of the likes of Ptolemy and Aristotle, ideas that would pave the way to the Renaissance and shape the modern world.

Ptolemy and Aristotle were Greeks; the Arabs merely collected their writings. Of the two, Ptolemy contained accurate astronomical observations. Aristotle is mostly a collection of nonsense: silly, unworkable ideas about physics such as heavy object fall faster and women have fewer teeth than men; the heart thinks and the brain serves as a radiator to cool the body, what civilization would have lost had that "wisdom" not been preserved. The astrolabe was invented by a Greek, Hipparchus, and refined by the Arabs. Algebra, 'the scale or balance' was a conception of the Arabs for solving equations for the unknown with the analogy that as with a balance scale, adding an equal weight to both sides will not alter an existing balance. Al Khwarasmi 'the Khwarasmian' a native of central Asia was a Muslim mathematician who essentially invented the flow chart, from which we get algorithm as name for the procedure to arrive at a desire product. Arabic numerals and paper were inventions of the Hindus and Chinese respectively mere passed on by the Arabs. The compass was probably an independent invention.

It is a foolish effort to engage in Atlanteanism, the search for a source culture--Egypt, China, Sumeria, Greece, Atlantis, Mu--from which all accomplishments of civilization can be traced. Inevitably the truth turns out to be more complex.

Yes, at one time the court at Baghdad was the must sophisticated and advanced in the world and once China was the most advanced, but both have long since fallen behind because rather than allow the free flow of ideas, they instead came to worship conformity and tradition. They may wish to return to their former splendor, but there is little chance of that if they continue to insist on conformity and reject the free exchange of ideas. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Germany was the scientific center of the world, but Herr Hitler and his friends wanted a science free of Jewish ideas and they ended up with the intellectual equivalent of the Republican party.

There is no fear that the Saudis or the Chinese will eclipse the US merely by spending money on schools; for the past fifty years the Japanese haven't been able to do that because they refuse to give up their rigid, unimaginative educational system, but if we insist on allowing the Sarah Palins and George W. Bushes of the world to dictate the curriculum, we can assure our own downfall. Already, the collusion of the publishing industry and the imbecility of the Texas school board is threatening America's place in the world.

[A-1 (imported)]

ha!

...wait for 25 years and binLaden is liable to die of old age, which most probably WILL be the vehicle of his ultimate demise...

My guess is that if they caught him alive and tried him in an open court that the CIA would end up being cited as accomplices to 9-11 BEFORE the fact.

So why hunt too hard?

After all, they made him what he is today, didn't they?