The Little Collider That Could

Because of the "explosion" in September at the LHC we haven't had much in the way of high energy particle physics stories recently. But I came across this little jewel in the washington post today. "The Holy Grail of Physics" talks about the atom smasher Fermi Lab, right here in America's backyard, and about scientists apparent never ending quest to waste money find something important.

Apparently they are getting closer to finding, or not finding, the Higgs boson particle.

"After many years of smashing together protons and anti-protons and searching through the subatomic wreckage, the scientists say they've been able to reduce the range of possible masses of the theoretical Higgs. They are hoping that their collider, the Tevatron, may yet tweeze a Higgs from the flotsam of atomic debris before the Large Hadron Collider, the Europeans' new, balky collider near Geneva, manages to find it." (wapo)

"Europeans' new, balky collider"... Take THAT Europe!