Brexperiment

As Britain negotiates its exit from prior trading contracts as a member of the European Union, it has begun to forge new economic relations and reinforce others. On September 20, 2017, the island nation held a signing ceremony at the U.S. Department of State marking an $88 million commitment to participate in a particle physics experiment. After centuries of history together, our two countries are committing to a future of understanding reality’s past using state-funded research.

America broke ground on a colossal collider last month in North Dakota called the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). To be housed in an obsolete gold mine which operated from 1876 to 2002, a particle detector is being installed which should help scientists better understand the properties of subatomic particles called neutrinos. Does subatomic sound small to you? Yeah, me too. To get a better sense of their size, Tufts University theorizes 100 billion solar neutrinos pass through the tip of your finger every second traveling at about the speed of light. Let’s just agree that they are small.

Detecting these little things requires them to collide with something else. Because of their small size, these collisions rarely happen naturally, so scientists are attempting to create an environment where it occurs more frequently. Enter the collider in North Dakota, scheduled for completion in 2024. Scientists will be shooting neutrinos from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, 800 miles away in Batavia, Illinois, searching for collisions, and analyzing data created by the impacts. Ultimately, physicists hope to help explain how the universe was able to create so much more matter than antimatter when it was young.

This deal demonstrates the nature of our mixed economies which are an important part of our reality. Governments underwrite experiments the private sector might otherwise ignore due to the risk of full financial failure. This fiscal outlay will provide jobs (i.e., Alexa has not yet figured out how to build colliders) allowing workers to consume in the local economy. When this giant petri dish gets going, we will begin to understand nature even more thoroughly than before; sometimes governments are here to help