End of An Era: Beginning of a Monopoly

The Big Red Button was pushed just after 2:00 PM on Saturday ending nearly three decades of high velocity particle impacts at the Tevatron facility at the Fermi Lab in Batavia, Illinois.  Our very own Ron Moore was there in the control room giving a blow-by-blow account on Facebook as the once world's-largest particle accelerator ceased to be.  Parts of the facility will still be used for other research and 1/3 of it will be turned into a visitor's center where wannabe Physicists like me can view the set up.

Ron and several thousands worth of other IQ points took one last run around the 4 mile Ring Road several hundred feet above the actual collider tunnel.

This leaves the search for Higg's Bosons and faster-than-light particles to mere Europeans in Switzerland at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility.  Can we trust the Europeans?  Will the Higgs ever be found?  Will Einstein recover from being kicked in the groin by no-weight particles traveling at faster than the speed of light?  Will the scientists ever be allowed to discuss findings questioning the antrhopogenic global warming theory?  Stay tuned as the soap opera continues...