alt Hacker NewsIsn't it significant in some sense that this was discovered in China first, and not the US?
In the sense of: we didn't know splitting the atom would change warfare forever, back when Einstein and others published on it. We don't know if there are discoveries of similar impact lying in wait somewhere. If China gets to such a discovery first, we are in Sputnik territory, to say the least.
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We knew. That's why Roosevelt started the Manhattan project after scientists wrote to him warning about it, to be sure that the Germans or the Soviets didn't develop it first.
But nuclear fission was discovered by scientists working in Nazi Germany (except Meitner who had fled to Sweden by then).
Plenty of things get discovered all over the world and this isn't a particularly earth shattering result. Discovering evidence of a particle predicted for 50 years is interesting but still pretty mundane.
The LHC which is doing much of the particle physics discovery is in Switzerland and France, if you need to be reminded, not the US.
The first strong force theory was published by Hideki Yukawa in Japan in 1935 (which won him the nobel prize) ... so uh, not exactly a sputnik problem.
Sputnik problems (and the nuclear race) are engineering and industrial races, not fundamental physics ones.
you are trying to see something that's not quite there in this case. there is shit ton of very good research that happens all over the world. but i also sympathize with what you are trying insinuate and that's also probably happening.
HEP is undeniably an international effort, and it's silly to try and spin this into something akin to the space race. While this is a useful and frankly brilliant potential confirmation of existing theory, that's what it is: confirmation (sort of). Without CERN, without universities across the world including all across Asia none of this would be possible.
Very few endeavors are as truly international as this because the problems are so hard to even explore, and the machines required to do so are the most complex and highly engineered on Earth. Lets not lose that international spirit in science because the blowhard narcissists who run our countries would find that temporarily useful to them.
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It's foundational science. The US scuence system calls for utility and time to merket. In such a system there is little space for gluons.