Recalling a fallen stars legacy

The impending death of the Tevatron adds to a gloomy time for American science.

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The machine known as the Tevatron is four miles around. Bison graze nearby on the 6,800 acres of former farmland occupied by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia,Illinois. Occasionally,physicists run races around the top of it.

It was turned on in 1983 to the sound of protesters who worried that its high-energy collisions between protons and antiprotons could bring about the end of the world or perhaps the whole universe. For the next three decades it reigned as a symbol of human curiosity and of American technological might,becoming the biggest,grandest,most violent physics experiment of its time,devouring a small citys worth of electricity to collide subatomic particles with energies of up to a trillion electron volts apiece in an effort to retrieve forces and laws that prevailed during the Big Bang.

Last Monday the Department of Energy,which runs Fermilab,as it is known,announced that despite last-minute appeals by physicists,the Tevatron will shut down as scheduled in September. The news disappointed American physicists who had hoped that three more years of running might give them a glimpse of as yet unobserved phenomena like the Higgs boson,a storied particle said to imbue other particles with mass. Its a shame to shut it down, said Lisa Randall,a Harvard physicist,who says she thinks the physics community gave up too easily.

That leaves the field of future discovery free for the Large Hadron Collider,which started a year ago outside Geneva at CERN,the European Organisation for Nuclear Research,and is now the world champion. The collider is 17 miles around and capable eventually,CERN says,of producing 7 trillion-electron-volt protons.

The impending death of the Tevatron adds to a gloomy time for American science,coming as it does just as NASA has announced that its flagship project,the James Webb Space Telescope,is $1.6 billion over budget and will be years late,knocking the pins out from under hopes of mounting a mission anytime soon to investigate the dark energy that is boosting the expansion of the universe.

Michael Turner,a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and vice president of the American Physical Society,said American scientists were struggling to adjust to a world in which Europe and Asia are attaining parity with the United States. We seem to be unable to make decisions,and continue to chase every opportunity,in the end doing nothing.

The Tevatron will be remembered for the discovery of the top quark,the last missing part of the ensemble that makes up ordinary matter,in 1995,and other intriguing results like the controversial discovery last summer of a particle that goes back and forth between being itself and its evil-twin antiparticle a little faster in one direction than the other,providing a possible clue to why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter. Physicists will be studying the data from its two big detectors,DZero and the Collider Detector at Fermilab for years.

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It will also be remembered as a fount of technological development whose influence spread far beyond high-energy physics. The development,in partnership with industry,of superconducting magnets for Fermilabs machine,said Young-Kee Kim,deputy director of the lab,helped pave the way for cheap MRI machines for hospitals.

Although it is the end for the Tevatron,it is not the end for Fermilab,which helped build the Large Hadron Collider and hosts a control room for one of that accelerators gigantic particle detectors,and is also home to a thriving cosmology programme. The lab has bet its long-term future on a new-generation accelerator programme called Project X which would produce intense proton beams for producing and scrutinising other particles like neutrinos.Dennis Overbye