We have a naive concept that "amount of stuff is conserved". That's just because we don't see tables or laptops randomly appearing. In fact no such law exists in physics. Stuff (okay, subatomic particles) can quite happily appear and disappear. The conservation law is that energy-mass, momentum, charge, a few other things are conserved. So when you stretch a gluon - i.e. put loads of energy into it - why not just let a new particle appear? Just our stupid misconceptions that make us think this is weird.

No we don't - general relativity says they are (equivalence principle), but we don't know that it's right - indeed we know that it's wrong...

That is correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation

I think the "predicted delay" was actually made after the observation. Easy to make a prediction that matches observation, but in the end it's probably model dependent.

I think most of the finite element/multiphysics packages started as research projects, either in university or government labs (some military, some conventional). For studying e.g. electromagnet design, heat deposition by currents /EM radiation e.g. microwave studio. Most of the radioactivation and nuclear shielding simulations used by the nuclear industry for designing radiation shielding are or were academic projects (e.g. MARS, FLUKA, MCNPX).

Someone has invented a neutrino telescope:- http://icecube.wisc.edu/ http://antares.in2p3.fr/ But the angular resolution is awful and the energy threshold is very high. So this only detects neutrinos from really super powerful cosmic stuff like black holes colliding.

To be pedantic, the most powerful CW proton accelerator in the world is IIRC at Paul Scherrer Institute. Most powerful pulsed source is SNS at Oak Ridge both produce about a MW I think. LHC is highest luminosity which is different.

Also increase in oil price, food price. This foreshadows much bigger political instability to come as oil prices go up. Lots of literature on his (see peak oil stuff). I would say dictatorship is considerably more stable than democracy - that's why most nations end up with dictatorships rather than democracies. It's only when people are wealthy enough to worry about who is ruling them that democracy can do okay.

Nb: In UK we've been in a state of emergency for the last 10 years, which has allowed the government to suspend habeas corpus, i.e. permit detention without trial. Formally this was illegal due to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) except in state of emergency. The ECHR, though it has the word European in, was actually invented by the Brits in post WWII era.

3) Fermilab pioneered the application of super-conductors for use in building the Tevatron.

Humm... you might want to check that

As an accelerator physicist (who doesn't know how to do slashdot formatting)

The basic physics is in a sort of golden age right now. Every 10-20 years we have discovered one or more new *fundamental forms of matter* - like discovering a new sort of electron or whatever (think 6 quarks, 6 leptons). Every 10-20 years we have discovered a new unification theory or fundamental law of physics - like maxwell did with unification of electricity and magnetism, or newton did with unification of planetary motion and gravitational motion (think gluons, W+-, Z0). So I think the idea that basic physics is not discovering things is wrong.

What is problematic is the amount of resources required to access the physics of each thing is steadily increasing. We aren't getting (much) better at building particle accelerators, we are just throwing more money at the problem. So it costs 10 billion euros to access LHC scale physics, making developing anything practical from it basically impossible. The reason we don't have a light source in every lab is that the cost of accessing the GeV energy scale is 0.5 billion euros. We do have a few per continent, but it doesn't look like it will become possible anytime soon to make this cheaper.

Some technologies provide us with hope. Superconducting magnets are getting cheaper. Wakefield type accelerators may make things cheaper (though they look horribly inefficient). But for the foreseeable future, there will be no synchrotron ray guns or neutrino radios because the cost of making a high intensity xray or neutrino beam is just too much...

The whole article is based on the premise that EITHER you have risk of accidental launch EX-OR you have risk of failure to launch deliberately. That patently isn't true and you can make trivial example code to show that this is the case.

This is war and shit happens. You go into someone's house with a few thousand guns and someone's gonna get shot. Let's think about whether we should go into the house next time...

I really hope the ILC gets the go ahead But you would not build it until you know the Higgs mass (if the Higgs exists) because you want to work with e+e- collisions on the centre of mass. Until you can prove the Higgs mass is in the design range of the machine, you simply wouldn't built. So I think that story is yarbles.