Ok, I know I will now enrage the supporters of electron-positron machines, in particular the one which discovered the charm quark and the tau lepton, or the ones which uncovered many mysteries of electroweak interactions in the nineties. But the achievements which the Tevatron has allowed, and the advancement of Science produced in the realms of QCD, electroweak theory, searches for new physics, B physics, are really outstanding, so much so that I cannot bring myself to making a list here. Suffices to say that some of the measurements produced by CDF and D0 with the Tevatron data will remain the best in the world for many years, maybe even a decade, into the running of the Large Hadron Collider, the CERN competitor which will start recording collisions in a couple of months.
Check out the graph above (courtesy G.Ch.), which shows the integrated luminosity delivered by the Tevatron since the start of Run II seven years ago: we just surpassed the seven inverse femtobarns mark! That corresponds to about five hundred trillion collisions delivered in the core of the CDF and D0 detectors, for a grand total of a quadrillion events! Kudos to the Tevatron scientists for this terrific goal!
A corresponding chart for the total notional value of derivatives (the probably worthless things held by big banks that are causing the collapse of the USA/UK global financial system) would show a similar increase, from 2002 to 2008, to $500 trillion,
so
to try to prop up the USA/UK system, the Obama administration seems to have promised the Big Five Banks (alphabetically - Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley) that the Treasury/Fed will print up however much money they need to cover their exposure (which as of March 2009, according to the Office of the Controller of the Currency, was about $280 trillion = more than half of the total).
Do you find it interesting that the USA seems to be on course to create dollars as fast as Fermilab creates collision events ?
If your life savings were in USA dollars, would you be happy seeing as many quadrillions of them printed as Fermilab has collisions?
Tony Smith
PS - Could an impending disaster in the derivatives/hedge fund business be the reason that, as Peter Woit noted on his blog, "... Mathematician Jim Simons is retiring from the job of running the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. ..."?