NPR’s “Morning Edition” eulogizes Fermilab’s Tevatron
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0627
“Project X” is introduced
On the 6 September broadcast of National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” Nell Greenfieldboyce presented a nearly seven-minute-long report on the imminent closing of the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab near Chicago. Without mentioning the death 18 years ago of the Superconducting Super Collider, but with plenty of attention to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), she made plain that dominance in particle physics has shifted to Europe.
The report discusses both America’s LHC participation and Fermilab’s hopes for sustaining Project X, which a Fermilab web page Fermilab web page summarizes this way:
Project X is a proposed high-intensity proton accelerator complex that could provide beam for a variety of physics projects. The proposed facility would provide particles at different energies to various experiments. The protons could be accelerated to create a high-intensity neutrino beam for use in neutrino oscillation experiments such as NOvA and the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment. Simultaneously, Project X could supply protons to kaon- and muon-based precision experiments. Other applications are under investigation. The accelerator would contain superconducting radio frequency components similar in design to those for a future lepton collider.
Online, NPR provides both the audio and a transcript from the piece. The network segued, by the way, from this story to a minute-long piece about astrophysics: “Astronomers: Ancient Star ‘Shouldn’t Exist’” .
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.