7 ms·

Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center

247 points by dyslexit 3y ago

h2odragon 3y ago
One 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 clean that room out and throw the stuff away. So what we got to do was help with that, and put anything we liked in my car instead of the dumpster. We were stripping stuff there in the parking lot to save space. Crammed that car full of junk. It was a truly wonderful day.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  One man's junk is another man's treasure.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I have a bunch of stuff in my house that I know there are people who would be happy to have it and maybe pay a few dollars but I live in a fairly small town and I'm certainly not about to go to the trouble of boxing things up and shipping them. I can get rid of some things by just leaving them at the end of the driveway with a free sign but doesn't work for everything.
    - cronix 3y ago
      ebay is your friend. People buy entire boxes of unknown old electronic equipment junk that may or may not be working. "As is." You don't even have to really list the contents, just a big picture of everything. I think a lot are scrapping the gold and components, something I got into for awhile. I got almost 4 oz of solid gold from crushed cpu's, memory, old IC's, cable connectors, etc., using nitric acid, a hammer and a jar. Also recovered silver. At current gold prices (about $1950/oz) those little bits add up. Old tantalum capacitors sell for quite a bit as well. They used to be huge and if recycled, many smaller modern surface mount caps could be made. There are several channels on youtube showing the process. It can be a fun hobby. Instead of taking my old gear to a recycling center, I throw it in acid (lol).
      - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
        Any videos on how to recover gold from crushed CPUs, ICs, etc?
        zdragnar 3y ago
        YouTube is your friend here. I think even NileRed has a video on it. Edit: here you go: https://youtu.be/ASQCa7mfjVo https://youtu.be/ASQCa7mfjVo He does it with PCBs in one and ram connectors in another, but mentions the process is essentially the same for everything else including CPUs. I'm not sure what the economics of the acids he uses versus nitric are, though.
        myself248 3y ago
        Please, if they're not already crushed, find a classic collector to give them to. Most things from the gilded age (heh) have significance as antiques. There's nothing more disheartening to a classic computing enthusiast than to see a historically-interesting minicomputer destroyed by goldbugs.
      - pengaru 3y ago
        Do you really think it's likely the person you're responding to is holding onto these items he knows would be of use to someone, with the intention of it becoming monetized as scrap?
  - rektide 3y ago
    So the adage goes but sometimes one man's junk just becomes another person's hoarding.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      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.
    - DeathArrow 3y ago
      What would be the fine difference between hoarding and collecting?
      - burnished 3y ago
        Well, one test if it is causing nevative impacts in other parts of your life.
      - moffkalast 3y ago
        Actually using or curating the stuff.
      - stametseater 3y ago
        Whether or not your home smells like rotting garbage. There is a big difference between filling some shelves with obsolete gadgets, and having a big pile of rotting food covering every food preparation surface in your kitchen because you have a severe untreated mental illness. Let's not whitewash the reality of hoarding to shame some nerds for having obscure interests.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        If you are a magnificent dragon, you have a hoard, if you are a puny human, you are just collecting.
    - squeaky-clean 3y ago
      What does one do with treasure but hoard it?
- jeffbee 3y ago
  As a teenager I got to work and study at Fermi for two weeks under a DoE summer program. There was one kid from each US state and territory, and a few from other countries. We worked in the shops assembling the D0 and Leon Lederman tried to teach cosmology, which was both an incredible privilege and ultimately futile. I was eating in the cafeteria the day the Texas Supercollider was canceled and I don’t think there’s ever been a sadder crowd of physicists anywhere. I wonder if they still do that summer program.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  Fermilab was built from late 1967 and opened in 1969 so that must have been really old stuff. Similar to your story, I got to take high school physics extra classes there, and it was awesome, like being in a Star Wars set with entirely normal parents who worked there and who could teach us really interesting physics (classical mostly, and relativity).
- mycall 3y ago
  I tried taking apart one of those old oscilloscopes. After the first screw, I heard a few nuts and parts drop behind it. I knew it was never going to be the same again. Complicated instruments.
- ithinkso 3y ago
  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
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    I’m not sure if it’s still there, but if you walked into the cafeteria the remote ops center for the CMS detector and the LHC was on your left hand side through a glass wall and door. My leadership chain was…interesting but it was incredibly cool in my mid 20s to lunch with high energy physicists and others in this space. https://cms.fnal.gov/remote-operations-center/ https://cms.fnal.gov/remote-operations-center/ (worked on CMS data taking for a year in the mid 00s)
    - beezle 3y ago
      I recall back in the 90s that Fermilab had a public telnet page one could connect at to get current beam line stats/info.
      - Pokepokalypse 3y ago
        back in the 1990s, they used to hold open house tours.
Kon-Peki 3y ago
> 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 talk to a reporter, you already know that DOE has a problem.
- chollida1 3y ago
  > 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?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    In general, companies are pretty sensitive about employees talking to reporters. And certainly employees who aren't media trained and talking about things that aren't explicitly public. Depends to some degree on the employee and the topic, but generally talking to media outside of official channels can easily get someone in trouble even at relatively open companies.
  - Nullabillity 3y ago
    Translation: poor leadership is endemic.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  No civil service government employee should openly talk to the media, ever.
  - bagels 3y ago
    Government should operate in secret?
prpl 3y ago
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.
- ccooffee 3y ago
  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-wWbHL7VsTAqS_Ic3gQmhjEVFb2NYN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivVzGpznw1U&list=PLAB-wWbHL7...
  - lumost 3y ago
    This may be an interesting example of a “zombie” organization. Fermilab exists to push the boundaries of particle physics. We stopped wanting to do that, or at the very least outlay the capital to do that. We likewise don’t want people at fermilab doing other things with their time. Meaning that they don’t have much to do but go through the motions. We have a few of these in science, it would arguably be better in the long run to refocus our science budget on problems we’re interested in solving and some “risk” budget for different ideas.
    - pieix 3y ago
      Government organizations should be wound down more regularly. Nobody would argue that a business unit that has outlived its usefulness should be funded in perpetuity, yet there seems to be this "strictly increasing" mindset around organizations funded by the taxpayer.
      - stametseater 3y ago
        > Nobody would argue that a business unit that has outlived its usefulness should be funded in perpetuity Au contraire, private sector bureaucrats aren't special. The constituent bureaucrats of that business unit certainly would and do advocate for the continuation of their fiefdoms, but in business settings their self-interested scheming is eventually overridden by business considerations (e.g. the people with the money, who want to stop hemorrhaging their money.) In government orgs, the bureaucrats have more influence (because there is more distance between the people who pay for it and the people who decide it should be paid for) so the bureaucrats are more effective at preserving bureaucracy for the sake of itself. However in each case, the instincts and inclinations of career bureaucrats are precisely the same: grow the org. This is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. It applies to both private and public bureaucracies alike.
Caligatio 3y ago
This makes me sad. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and got accepted into the Saturday Morning Physics Program (https://saturdaymorningphysics.fnal.gov/ 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.
1letterunixname 3y ago
Some 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.
- luckylion 3y ago
  "Road maintenance" shouldn't be done by private companies that are given contracts by the government? Why not?
  - 1letterunixname 3y ago
    "Please insert your FriendlyCard to unlock the street in front of your house." And toll turnpikes. "Public-Private Partnerships" are neoliberal fantasies of privatized, for-profit monopolies performing government functions while taxing working people. Most often, there is some sort of corrupt and unethical favoritism and revolving door between government official(s) and the vendor corporation.
  - photochemsyn 3y ago
    It really depends on where responsibility begins and ends. It might make a lot more sense, financially, for the government to manage maintenance using supplies and equipments purchased from private companies, with the people working on the roads being government employees instead of employees of the contractors. However, for specific jobs - say building a new bridge, etc. - it might make sense to have that be a complete private contract, and then, after it's built, maintenance becomes the government responsibility. In general however, there's too much opportunity for corruption if contracts are just blindly given to private interests by politicians. Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction contracts were a good example of how bad that can get.
    - luckylion 3y ago
      I think there's a good reason to have anti-corruption measures and bring down the hammer hard on everyone in the administration that tries to circumvent them, but I do believe that government is just too inefficient when it comes to doing things. I'd rather risk that every tenth contract is fraudulent than have every contract cost twice as much with the government doing it themselves. There's just zero incentive for government employees to work quickly and efficiently. Check private contractor's work to make sure they're not cutting any corners, make corruption harder and incentivize whistle-blowers, but letting the government do things is not something I want as a taxpayer.
alangibson 3y ago
The real problem is that theoretical particle physics had hit a local optimum that they can't break out of. String theory hasn't panned out, quantum gravity hasn't panned out, and no one really knows where to go next.
- pa7x1 3y ago
  This is a complete misunderstanding of the state of physics. The problem is not theoretical physics, if anything, the problem lies in our technological/engineering prowess that has not been able to follow our advances in physics. The Standard Model has some issues but it's, in principle, a valid effective description of all the fundamental forces minus gravity. The issue is that quantum effects of gravity are negligible until the Planck scale, we have no technological means to get even close to those levels. That is, physicists have been able to provide an understanding of the universe that for all we know for certain might be valid up to the Planck scale, which is where we know for sure new physics must appear. And because our technological ability is lagging much farther behind they must probe that new physics blindly, without any experimental evidence. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Imagine that the ancient greeks managed to discover Quantum Mechanics. They lay down the correct Schrodinger equation, and understand the superposition principle, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, etc. They know it can potentially explain the atom but lacking sufficient engineering prowess they cannot really test the theory and verify its validity. This is the situation physics is in, we have mathematically consistent theories of quantum gravity but we cannot know if it's the correct description of the universe because experimental evidence is inaccessible and might be inaccessible for centuries to come.
  - alangibson 3y ago
    > The problem is not theoretical physics, if anything, the problem lies in our technological/engineering prowess that has not been able to follow our advances in physics. That used to be my view, but it turns I was wrong. The standard model was complete in the 1970's, and everything beyond it since then has been fruitless. Axions excluded, the other kind of axion excluded, sterile neutrinos excluded to make just a few. Even Roger Penrose thinks we're on the wrong track with quantum gravity. Check out Sabine Hofstetter's voluminous output on this issue for a better breakdown than I can give.
dt23 3y ago
Back in 2015 when I still thought I'd be a physicist, I was a summer intern at Fermilab on the MicroBooNE experiment. The sense of excitement and teamwork on the 10th floor was something I dearly missed when I went to CERN the year after. Every day at 3pm was "coffee and cookies", and my colleagues and I would join the line filled with physicists of all ages and from across the lab, to grab a cookie or maybe two. On Fridays the coffee turned into wine and the cookies into cheese. The second floor, where the coffee was, had a rotating art installation, which at some point included an acrylic box filled with water. One day this box went from being empty to containing a live goldfish. I hope Fermilab retains this sense of magic that I have found in so few other places.
- peteradio 3y ago
  Yea well cern had beer on tap ... For lunch!
  - brnt 3y ago
    "beer"... /ducks
    - smcl 3y ago
      Ok now I’m curious what beer is served at CERN. I am not familiar with any Swiss beer and only a handful of unspectacular French beers.
      - fdeee 3y ago
        In 1996 maybe Heineken: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/flaschen-im-ring-a-45296bec-0002-0001-0000-000008947207 https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/flaschen-im-ring-a-45296...
      - DoughnutHole 3y ago
        I don’t know about the beer at CERN specifically but the beer culture of Geneva generally is subpar.
samstave 3y ago
Every time stories appear about the Particle Physics Center, Fermi Lab - they seem to show up in waves.
- an1sotropy 3y ago
  well that's the article-wave duality in action.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    OW OW OW
photochemsyn 3y ago
DOE should really be spending more money on condensed matter physics than on high-energy physics, at least the former has more practical applications and research can be done with smaller budgets, and the latter has plateaued in many ways. Neutrinos are pretty fascinating, it's true, but the price tag's pretty high. DOE could instead be financing solar PV research, battery research, etc... although then the politicians would likely cut their budget under pressure from the investor-owned utilities and fossil fuel exporters.
- rsfern 3y ago
  DOE already funds a ton of research programs in battery tech, PV, and other renewables. I mean it would be great if they could fund even more, but you make it seem like some kind of politically untenable topic when it’s not
analognoise 3y ago
They should give it to Northrop Grumman instead - if it's 12 years late and 10x over budget, everyone will get awards, like what happened on JWST.
yummypaint 3y ago
My Fermilab story: when I was designing my dissertation experiment it became clear that i would need ~$100k in silicon strip charged particle detectors, and that no company would ever microbond the thousands of connections for me due to the low volume. Fermilab gave me detectors that had been QC rejects from the outer barrel of the CMS detector at CERN for free, and bonded them to my boards for essentially materials cost. For my purposes they worked perfectly. The microbonding machines and the wonderful people associated with them are still to the best of my knowledge the only viable place in the US to have 9x9 cm silicon autobonded in small volume.
- killjoywashere 3y ago
  Reminds me of this story: https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassblower-20160613-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb... There are continuous technical workforce challenges in science because the methods keep advancing. If only there were money it. Instead we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber and we outsource and offshore the entire scientific supply chain.
  - clivefx 3y ago
    I don't know if that is true. Stuff just changes. To solve similar problems to this, my lab developed sapphire metal bonding techniques that could be run with CNC machined parts. Everything became nice and reliable and repeatable. We lose techniques all the time but gain new ones. I designed a scientific instrument once that had a long precision bore through it. I designed it with the belief that I needed clearances for a large stiff boring bar to make the feature. I showed the prints to my machinist, and he told me they were just gonna put it on the five axis and hit the bore on both sides with an end mill. That it was as accurate as how the old guys did it. It was.
    - spacecadet 3y ago
      As an ex machinist, this is the way.
  - 3y ago
dugmartin 3y ago
One of my favorite memories from thirty years ago in college was having small group breakfast with a few other students through the honor's program with Leon Lederman, the Nobel winning physicist that was the then Director of Fermilab. He had a lot of great stories about how big government funded research worked and was very charismatic. I toured Fermilab later in college while we where near there for an ACM programming competition. The one thing I remember from the tour was a big red button labeled "Start" next to some huge experiment. The tour guide saw us looking at it and said something like "You don't want to touch that". I've often wondered if that was real or just a prop they used for tours. Btw, I'll never forget what Leon said when asked by a physics student about what the most important thing to learn or study as an undergrad. He said, "learn to write".
RedCondor 3y ago
>Theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg had this to say on [the SSC's] cancellation: >>Spending for the Superconducting Super Collider had become a target for a new class of congressmen elected in 1992. They were eager to show that they could cut what they saw as Texas pork, and they didn’t feel that much was at stake. The cold war was over, and discoveries at the SSC were not going to produce anything of immediate practical importance. https://redsails.org/concessions/#education-and-research-its-a-commie-sky https://redsails.org/concessions/#education-and-research-its...
Animats 3y ago
They're in trouble because they didn't have a few people who knew how to manage excavation contracting.
pasttense01 3y ago
I think it is a poor idea for the Department of Energy to being hiring businesses or organizations to be managing the National Laboratories. This means there are three levels of management: the DOE, the managing organization/business (such as the University of Chicago) and the lab itself. Eliminate this middle layer--so that management is either done by the DOE or the laboratory.
- frumiousirc 3y ago
  I expect many scientists would quit working for a lab if they had to become direct gov't employees and those who are non-US citizens would be even more excluded than they are now. Both results would degrade the quality of the scientific output of the labs and not necessarily save any gov't expenditure. I also suspect the contractor layer gives some continuity and smoothing of the rocky year-to-year games played by executive and congress critters.
bmitc 3y ago
A big issue at these labs is that there's this idea that people with PhDs think only others with technical PhDs can manage things. Management takes a certain set of skills, and quite a lot of PhDs have zero experience outside of academic environments with managing things. > “We did not write a very good contract for the excavation,” ... “There were all kinds of loopholes in it, and the excavation company made an awful lot of money off of us.” Another thing that strikes me is, why is construction in the U.S. so corrupt and such a money pit? I don't think I have ever heard of a large construction project being delivered on time and on budget. I understand construction is very difficult, but it just seems out of control.
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  https://youtube.com/watch?v=dOe_6vuaR_s https://youtube.com/watch?v=dOe_6vuaR_s
  - bmitc 3y ago
    Thanks for the video. I'll watch in full later. But it is interesting that he opens with The Big Dig in Boston. There have been several counts, including prosecutions, of fraud in that project. It wasn't just because it was complex. There was rampant fraud and corruption. After some skimming, it didn't appear that that video covers that. I have also read anecdotes about that project. For example, stories of contractors tricking out their personal trucks and tools and booking it to the protect.
    - dreamcompiler 3y ago
      He does talk about corruption a bit but he focuses on other factors more.
      - bmitc 3y ago
        Corruption is bad in and of itself, but it also adjusts incentives. So it ends up amplifying any inherent complexity and challenges.
josh2600 3y ago
Threads like these make me really happy to be a Hacker News reader. This is a slice of life that is very far afield from my own but one where I appreciate the attention to detail and correctness that holds the whole damn thing together. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the hacker mentality extends far beyond software. The hacker mentality is a way of life.
vuciv1 3y ago
It’s worth noting that these large-scale projects, like the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, are incredibly complex and have no real historical precedent. The sheer scale and ambition of these endeavors make it nearly impossible to accurately predict timelines and budgets. It's easy to criticize Fermilab for cost overruns and delays, but we must remember that they are pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and technology. The nature of cutting-edge research means that there will always be unknowns and challenges that cannot be anticipated.
- gammarator 3y ago
  > The "iron law of megaprojects": Over budget, over time, over and over again. https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0003 https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0003
iampivot 3y ago
That is one very depressing looking building! As if it was built in North Korea!
- blueline 3y ago
  Wilson Hall is the total opposite of depressing for me. Especially the interior is quite beautiful: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UOpsfRLRr_I/VbhWuR4OeBI/AAAAAAAABQ0/uHbmglrb3X4/s1600/5958161432_c48a2eba65_b.jpg https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UOpsfRLRr_I/VbhWuR4OeBI/AAAAAAAAB... https://live.staticflickr.com/3800/33033871090_f658526696_b.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/3800/33033871090_f658526696_b.... The art and architecture around the lab has a surprisingly rich history dating back to its first director who was also a sculptor/artist: https://history.fnal.gov/historical/art_arch/art_architecture.html https://history.fnal.gov/historical/art_arch/art_architectur...

247 points by dyslexit 3y ago

One 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 clean that room out and throw the stuff away. So what we got to do was help with that, and put anything we liked in my car instead of the dumpster. We were stripping stuff there in the parking lot to save space. Crammed that car full of junk. It was a truly wonderful day.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DeathArrow 3y ago
One man's junk is another man's treasure.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I have a bunch of stuff in my house that I know there are people who would be happy to have it and maybe pay a few dollars but I live in a fairly small town and I'm certainly not about to go to the trouble of boxing things up and shipping them. I can get rid of some things by just leaving them at the end of the driveway with a free sign but doesn't work for everything.
  - cronix 3y ago
    ebay is your friend. People buy entire boxes of unknown old electronic equipment junk that may or may not be working. "As is." You don't even have to really list the contents, just a big picture of everything. I think a lot are scrapping the gold and components, something I got into for awhile. I got almost 4 oz of solid gold from crushed cpu's, memory, old IC's, cable connectors, etc., using nitric acid, a hammer and a jar. Also recovered silver. At current gold prices (about $1950/oz) those little bits add up. Old tantalum capacitors sell for quite a bit as well. They used to be huge and if recycled, many smaller modern surface mount caps could be made. There are several channels on youtube showing the process. It can be a fun hobby. Instead of taking my old gear to a recycling center, I throw it in acid (lol).
    - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
      Any videos on how to recover gold from crushed CPUs, ICs, etc?
      - zdragnar 3y ago
        YouTube is your friend here. I think even NileRed has a video on it. Edit: here you go: https://youtu.be/ASQCa7mfjVo https://youtu.be/ASQCa7mfjVo He does it with PCBs in one and ram connectors in another, but mentions the process is essentially the same for everything else including CPUs. I'm not sure what the economics of the acids he uses versus nitric are, though.
      - myself248 3y ago
        Please, if they're not already crushed, find a classic collector to give them to. Most things from the gilded age (heh) have significance as antiques. There's nothing more disheartening to a classic computing enthusiast than to see a historically-interesting minicomputer destroyed by goldbugs.
    - pengaru 3y ago
      Do you really think it's likely the person you're responding to is holding onto these items he knows would be of use to someone, with the intention of it becoming monetized as scrap?
- rektide 3y ago
  So the adage goes but sometimes one man's junk just becomes another person's hoarding.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    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.
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    What would be the fine difference between hoarding and collecting?
    - burnished 3y ago
      Well, one test if it is causing nevative impacts in other parts of your life.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      Actually using or curating the stuff.
    - stametseater 3y ago
      Whether or not your home smells like rotting garbage. There is a big difference between filling some shelves with obsolete gadgets, and having a big pile of rotting food covering every food preparation surface in your kitchen because you have a severe untreated mental illness. Let's not whitewash the reality of hoarding to shame some nerds for having obscure interests.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      If you are a magnificent dragon, you have a hoard, if you are a puny human, you are just collecting.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    What does one do with treasure but hoard it?
jeffbee 3y ago
As a teenager I got to work and study at Fermi for two weeks under a DoE summer program. There was one kid from each US state and territory, and a few from other countries. We worked in the shops assembling the D0 and Leon Lederman tried to teach cosmology, which was both an incredible privilege and ultimately futile. I was eating in the cafeteria the day the Texas Supercollider was canceled and I don’t think there’s ever been a sadder crowd of physicists anywhere. I wonder if they still do that summer program.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
Fermilab was built from late 1967 and opened in 1969 so that must have been really old stuff. Similar to your story, I got to take high school physics extra classes there, and it was awesome, like being in a Star Wars set with entirely normal parents who worked there and who could teach us really interesting physics (classical mostly, and relativity).
mycall 3y ago
I tried taking apart one of those old oscilloscopes. After the first screw, I heard a few nuts and parts drop behind it. I knew it was never going to be the same again. Complicated instruments.
ithinkso 3y ago
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
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  I’m not sure if it’s still there, but if you walked into the cafeteria the remote ops center for the CMS detector and the LHC was on your left hand side through a glass wall and door. My leadership chain was…interesting but it was incredibly cool in my mid 20s to lunch with high energy physicists and others in this space. https://cms.fnal.gov/remote-operations-center/ https://cms.fnal.gov/remote-operations-center/ (worked on CMS data taking for a year in the mid 00s)
  - beezle 3y ago
    I recall back in the 90s that Fermilab had a public telnet page one could connect at to get current beam line stats/info.
    - Pokepokalypse 3y ago
      back in the 1990s, they used to hold open house tours.

Kon-Peki 3y ago

> 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 talk to a reporter, you already know that DOE has a problem.

chollida1 3y ago
> 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?
- ghaff 3y ago
  In general, companies are pretty sensitive about employees talking to reporters. And certainly employees who aren't media trained and talking about things that aren't explicitly public. Depends to some degree on the employee and the topic, but generally talking to media outside of official channels can easily get someone in trouble even at relatively open companies.
- Nullabillity 3y ago
  Translation: poor leadership is endemic.
Spooky23 3y ago
No civil service government employee should openly talk to the media, ever.
- bagels 3y ago
  Government should operate in secret?

prpl 3y ago

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.

ccooffee 3y ago
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-wWbHL7VsTAqS_Ic3gQmhjEVFb2NYN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivVzGpznw1U&list=PLAB-wWbHL7...
- lumost 3y ago
  This may be an interesting example of a “zombie” organization. Fermilab exists to push the boundaries of particle physics. We stopped wanting to do that, or at the very least outlay the capital to do that. We likewise don’t want people at fermilab doing other things with their time. Meaning that they don’t have much to do but go through the motions. We have a few of these in science, it would arguably be better in the long run to refocus our science budget on problems we’re interested in solving and some “risk” budget for different ideas.
  - pieix 3y ago
    Government organizations should be wound down more regularly. Nobody would argue that a business unit that has outlived its usefulness should be funded in perpetuity, yet there seems to be this "strictly increasing" mindset around organizations funded by the taxpayer.
    - stametseater 3y ago
      > Nobody would argue that a business unit that has outlived its usefulness should be funded in perpetuity Au contraire, private sector bureaucrats aren't special. The constituent bureaucrats of that business unit certainly would and do advocate for the continuation of their fiefdoms, but in business settings their self-interested scheming is eventually overridden by business considerations (e.g. the people with the money, who want to stop hemorrhaging their money.) In government orgs, the bureaucrats have more influence (because there is more distance between the people who pay for it and the people who decide it should be paid for) so the bureaucrats are more effective at preserving bureaucracy for the sake of itself. However in each case, the instincts and inclinations of career bureaucrats are precisely the same: grow the org. This is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. It applies to both private and public bureaucracies alike.

Caligatio 3y ago

This makes me sad. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and got accepted into the Saturday Morning Physics Program (https://saturdaymorningphysics.fnal.gov/ 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.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Some 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.

luckylion 3y ago
"Road maintenance" shouldn't be done by private companies that are given contracts by the government? Why not?
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  "Please insert your FriendlyCard to unlock the street in front of your house." And toll turnpikes. "Public-Private Partnerships" are neoliberal fantasies of privatized, for-profit monopolies performing government functions while taxing working people. Most often, there is some sort of corrupt and unethical favoritism and revolving door between government official(s) and the vendor corporation.
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  It really depends on where responsibility begins and ends. It might make a lot more sense, financially, for the government to manage maintenance using supplies and equipments purchased from private companies, with the people working on the roads being government employees instead of employees of the contractors. However, for specific jobs - say building a new bridge, etc. - it might make sense to have that be a complete private contract, and then, after it's built, maintenance becomes the government responsibility. In general however, there's too much opportunity for corruption if contracts are just blindly given to private interests by politicians. Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction contracts were a good example of how bad that can get.
  - luckylion 3y ago
    I think there's a good reason to have anti-corruption measures and bring down the hammer hard on everyone in the administration that tries to circumvent them, but I do believe that government is just too inefficient when it comes to doing things. I'd rather risk that every tenth contract is fraudulent than have every contract cost twice as much with the government doing it themselves. There's just zero incentive for government employees to work quickly and efficiently. Check private contractor's work to make sure they're not cutting any corners, make corruption harder and incentivize whistle-blowers, but letting the government do things is not something I want as a taxpayer.

alangibson 3y ago

The real problem is that theoretical particle physics had hit a local optimum that they can't break out of. String theory hasn't panned out, quantum gravity hasn't panned out, and no one really knows where to go next.

pa7x1 3y ago
This is a complete misunderstanding of the state of physics. The problem is not theoretical physics, if anything, the problem lies in our technological/engineering prowess that has not been able to follow our advances in physics. The Standard Model has some issues but it's, in principle, a valid effective description of all the fundamental forces minus gravity. The issue is that quantum effects of gravity are negligible until the Planck scale, we have no technological means to get even close to those levels. That is, physicists have been able to provide an understanding of the universe that for all we know for certain might be valid up to the Planck scale, which is where we know for sure new physics must appear. And because our technological ability is lagging much farther behind they must probe that new physics blindly, without any experimental evidence. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Imagine that the ancient greeks managed to discover Quantum Mechanics. They lay down the correct Schrodinger equation, and understand the superposition principle, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, etc. They know it can potentially explain the atom but lacking sufficient engineering prowess they cannot really test the theory and verify its validity. This is the situation physics is in, we have mathematically consistent theories of quantum gravity but we cannot know if it's the correct description of the universe because experimental evidence is inaccessible and might be inaccessible for centuries to come.
- alangibson 3y ago
  > The problem is not theoretical physics, if anything, the problem lies in our technological/engineering prowess that has not been able to follow our advances in physics. That used to be my view, but it turns I was wrong. The standard model was complete in the 1970's, and everything beyond it since then has been fruitless. Axions excluded, the other kind of axion excluded, sterile neutrinos excluded to make just a few. Even Roger Penrose thinks we're on the wrong track with quantum gravity. Check out Sabine Hofstetter's voluminous output on this issue for a better breakdown than I can give.

dt23 3y ago

Back in 2015 when I still thought I'd be a physicist, I was a summer intern at Fermilab on the MicroBooNE experiment. The sense of excitement and teamwork on the 10th floor was something I dearly missed when I went to CERN the year after. Every day at 3pm was "coffee and cookies", and my colleagues and I would join the line filled with physicists of all ages and from across the lab, to grab a cookie or maybe two. On Fridays the coffee turned into wine and the cookies into cheese. The second floor, where the coffee was, had a rotating art installation, which at some point included an acrylic box filled with water. One day this box went from being empty to containing a live goldfish. I hope Fermilab retains this sense of magic that I have found in so few other places.

peteradio 3y ago
Yea well cern had beer on tap ... For lunch!
- brnt 3y ago
  "beer"... /ducks
  - smcl 3y ago
    Ok now I’m curious what beer is served at CERN. I am not familiar with any Swiss beer and only a handful of unspectacular French beers.
    - fdeee 3y ago
      In 1996 maybe Heineken: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/flaschen-im-ring-a-45296bec-0002-0001-0000-000008947207 https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/flaschen-im-ring-a-45296...
    - DoughnutHole 3y ago
      I don’t know about the beer at CERN specifically but the beer culture of Geneva generally is subpar.

samstave 3y ago

Every time stories appear about the Particle Physics Center, Fermi Lab - they seem to show up in waves.

an1sotropy 3y ago
well that's the article-wave duality in action.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  OW OW OW

photochemsyn 3y ago

DOE should really be spending more money on condensed matter physics than on high-energy physics, at least the former has more practical applications and research can be done with smaller budgets, and the latter has plateaued in many ways. Neutrinos are pretty fascinating, it's true, but the price tag's pretty high. DOE could instead be financing solar PV research, battery research, etc... although then the politicians would likely cut their budget under pressure from the investor-owned utilities and fossil fuel exporters.

rsfern 3y ago
DOE already funds a ton of research programs in battery tech, PV, and other renewables. I mean it would be great if they could fund even more, but you make it seem like some kind of politically untenable topic when it’s not

analognoise 3y ago

They should give it to Northrop Grumman instead - if it's 12 years late and 10x over budget, everyone will get awards, like what happened on JWST.

yummypaint 3y ago

My Fermilab story: when I was designing my dissertation experiment it became clear that i would need ~$100k in silicon strip charged particle detectors, and that no company would ever microbond the thousands of connections for me due to the low volume. Fermilab gave me detectors that had been QC rejects from the outer barrel of the CMS detector at CERN for free, and bonded them to my boards for essentially materials cost. For my purposes they worked perfectly. The microbonding machines and the wonderful people associated with them are still to the best of my knowledge the only viable place in the US to have 9x9 cm silicon autobonded in small volume.

killjoywashere 3y ago
Reminds me of this story: https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassblower-20160613-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb... There are continuous technical workforce challenges in science because the methods keep advancing. If only there were money it. Instead we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber and we outsource and offshore the entire scientific supply chain.
- clivefx 3y ago
  I don't know if that is true. Stuff just changes. To solve similar problems to this, my lab developed sapphire metal bonding techniques that could be run with CNC machined parts. Everything became nice and reliable and repeatable. We lose techniques all the time but gain new ones. I designed a scientific instrument once that had a long precision bore through it. I designed it with the belief that I needed clearances for a large stiff boring bar to make the feature. I showed the prints to my machinist, and he told me they were just gonna put it on the five axis and hit the bore on both sides with an end mill. That it was as accurate as how the old guys did it. It was.
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    As an ex machinist, this is the way.
- 3y ago

dugmartin 3y ago

One of my favorite memories from thirty years ago in college was having small group breakfast with a few other students through the honor's program with Leon Lederman, the Nobel winning physicist that was the then Director of Fermilab. He had a lot of great stories about how big government funded research worked and was very charismatic. I toured Fermilab later in college while we where near there for an ACM programming competition. The one thing I remember from the tour was a big red button labeled "Start" next to some huge experiment. The tour guide saw us looking at it and said something like "You don't want to touch that". I've often wondered if that was real or just a prop they used for tours. Btw, I'll never forget what Leon said when asked by a physics student about what the most important thing to learn or study as an undergrad. He said, "learn to write".

RedCondor 3y ago

>Theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg had this to say on [the SSC's] cancellation: >>Spending for the Superconducting Super Collider had become a target for a new class of congressmen elected in 1992. They were eager to show that they could cut what they saw as Texas pork, and they didn’t feel that much was at stake. The cold war was over, and discoveries at the SSC were not going to produce anything of immediate practical importance. https://redsails.org/concessions/#education-and-research-its-a-commie-sky https://redsails.org/concessions/#education-and-research-its...

Animats 3y ago

They're in trouble because they didn't have a few people who knew how to manage excavation contracting.

pasttense01 3y ago

I think it is a poor idea for the Department of Energy to being hiring businesses or organizations to be managing the National Laboratories. This means there are three levels of management: the DOE, the managing organization/business (such as the University of Chicago) and the lab itself. Eliminate this middle layer--so that management is either done by the DOE or the laboratory.

frumiousirc 3y ago
I expect many scientists would quit working for a lab if they had to become direct gov't employees and those who are non-US citizens would be even more excluded than they are now. Both results would degrade the quality of the scientific output of the labs and not necessarily save any gov't expenditure. I also suspect the contractor layer gives some continuity and smoothing of the rocky year-to-year games played by executive and congress critters.

bmitc 3y ago

A big issue at these labs is that there's this idea that people with PhDs think only others with technical PhDs can manage things. Management takes a certain set of skills, and quite a lot of PhDs have zero experience outside of academic environments with managing things. > “We did not write a very good contract for the excavation,” ... “There were all kinds of loopholes in it, and the excavation company made an awful lot of money off of us.” Another thing that strikes me is, why is construction in the U.S. so corrupt and such a money pit? I don't think I have ever heard of a large construction project being delivered on time and on budget. I understand construction is very difficult, but it just seems out of control.

dreamcompiler 3y ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dOe_6vuaR_s https://youtube.com/watch?v=dOe_6vuaR_s
- bmitc 3y ago
  Thanks for the video. I'll watch in full later. But it is interesting that he opens with The Big Dig in Boston. There have been several counts, including prosecutions, of fraud in that project. It wasn't just because it was complex. There was rampant fraud and corruption. After some skimming, it didn't appear that that video covers that. I have also read anecdotes about that project. For example, stories of contractors tricking out their personal trucks and tools and booking it to the protect.
  - dreamcompiler 3y ago
    He does talk about corruption a bit but he focuses on other factors more.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      Corruption is bad in and of itself, but it also adjusts incentives. So it ends up amplifying any inherent complexity and challenges.

josh2600 3y ago

Threads like these make me really happy to be a Hacker News reader. This is a slice of life that is very far afield from my own but one where I appreciate the attention to detail and correctness that holds the whole damn thing together. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the hacker mentality extends far beyond software. The hacker mentality is a way of life.

vuciv1 3y ago

It’s worth noting that these large-scale projects, like the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, are incredibly complex and have no real historical precedent. The sheer scale and ambition of these endeavors make it nearly impossible to accurately predict timelines and budgets. It's easy to criticize Fermilab for cost overruns and delays, but we must remember that they are pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and technology. The nature of cutting-edge research means that there will always be unknowns and challenges that cannot be anticipated.

gammarator 3y ago
> The "iron law of megaprojects": Over budget, over time, over and over again. https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0003 https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0003

iampivot 3y ago

That is one very depressing looking building! As if it was built in North Korea!

blueline 3y ago
Wilson Hall is the total opposite of depressing for me. Especially the interior is quite beautiful: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UOpsfRLRr_I/VbhWuR4OeBI/AAAAAAAABQ0/uHbmglrb3X4/s1600/5958161432_c48a2eba65_b.jpg https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UOpsfRLRr_I/VbhWuR4OeBI/AAAAAAAAB... https://live.staticflickr.com/3800/33033871090_f658526696_b.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/3800/33033871090_f658526696_b.... The art and architecture around the lab has a surprisingly rich history dating back to its first director who was also a sculptor/artist: https://history.fnal.gov/historical/art_arch/art_architecture.html https://history.fnal.gov/historical/art_arch/art_architectur...