Welcome again to JJNN for Monday August 25th, 2008. Today we will be taking about an interesting open house.
A lot of different places have open houses. There are the companies that want to show themselves to potential employees, schools that want to be open for any parents that want to watch class, and of course the kind that actually involves houses being shown to potential buyers. The open house that I want to talked about is in this news story.
Japanese's High Energy Accelerator Research Origination (known as KEK because of the the Japanese name) is going to hold their open house on August 31st. I would love to go to this open house. I have always wanted to go to an accelerator and see how things actually work. The basic idea is that magnets are used to accelerate subatomic particles around around a huge circular track. When the particles gather enough energy (speed up enough) the magnets are used make the particles collide. This helps scientists learn a lot more about what the particles are made up of and what happens in high energy and speed collisions.
KEK is located in Tsukuba city. It was started in 1997 and has an accelerator that is over 3Km long. Their system can accelerate electrons to an energy of 8GeV and positrons up to 3.5GeV, where GeV stands for Giga-electron volt. That is a lot of energy.
This year KEK's open house has the theme of "Space, Materials, and Life" They will be showing how their accelerator helps to reveal some of the hidden secrets in those three categories. It is amazing what one little circular tubed buried underground can reveal to the world.
It is too bad people in other parts of the world are trying to shut down other accelerators. Here is a little news story I found about that on youtube. I am too disgusted by the terrible science that people use to try to shut down the accelerator and the good science that comes out of it that I really can't talk about it. Just watch and be ready to shake your head.
Any way, it is now time for the word of the day. Today's word is 加速器(かそくき). It is pronounced kasokuki and means accelerator. I really do want to go and see an accelerator some day.
That's it for today. See you next time at JJNN.
Unfortunately, when new frontiers are reached and breached, there will always be those that are nervous to take a step over. And its annoying because its this mentality thats keeping technology from rolling forward.
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You're right. I am always amazed by how much people oppose scientific moves forward. If people like that we would still be in the dark ages.
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