The Big Dig for Higgs

Today’s quiz: What do you call a ring that is 17 miles long yet 300 feet below the ground, uses the world’s largest supply of liquid helium, and cost $10 billion?

Why that would be the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator of course! Known as LHC, the Geneva-based Large Hadron Collider will have seven times the power of its closest rival, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago.

As a result, scientists are gradually leaving the US for physics’ new center of gravity in Switzerland.

The LHC’s main goal is to find physical evidence of the Higgs boson, the only Standard Model elementary particle yet to be observed. Not quite a unified field theory like the one Einstein searched for most of his life, the Standard Model incorporates quantum mechanics and special relativity but not gravity.

At 22%, Switzerland already has one of the highest percentages of foreigners in the world. And with the influx of Fermi scientists it will get ever so slightly higher.

It seems that in the American immigration debate someone lost sight of how to keep immigrants – like world class scientists – we currently have but are about to lose: the Fermi lab will close in 2009.

Maybe all America needs to keep more smart people from leaving is a new Standard Model for its political system. And of course a political accelerator.

Minimum Wage, Switzerland, and the Iraqi war

Congress voted to increase the minimum wage to seven dollars twenty-five cents per hour by 2009. The federal minimum wage was last increased in 1997.

Working 40 hours a week, taking two weeks unpaid vacation and 8 unpaid holidays will earn a minimum wage worker just over $14,000 a year. I thought it might be interesting to see what other countries do.

The first minimum wage laws were introduced by Australia in 1896. Today over ninety percent of countries have a minimum wage. Australia, Ireland, and Luxembourg all come in at around $22,000 a year, with the UK, France, and the Netherlands close behind at around $20,000. But #1 at $29,000 a year is Switzerland. And we have an immigration problem? How come everyone’s coming here and not to Switzerland?

There were some surprises: Japan’s is nearly 20% lower than the US at $11,300 a year. And Iraq’s is $1,900 a year for skilled workers. Let’s see, including the bill just passed by Congress, the GAO says we spent $400 billion on the war in Iraq, which works out to $46,500 per Iraqi citizen who is at least 20 years of age. You’d think they’d at least make that the minimum wage. But then it would be more than three times the US’s – and nine times more than that of Kansas, whose minimum wage is just $2.65 an hour for jobs not subject to the federal minimum.

It actually turns out that folks are still planning on going to Kansas. Between 1995 and 2025 Kansas expects to gain 102,000 immigrants. And what about Switzerland? According to the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, 21.6 percent of the population are foreigners, placing Switzerland with one of the highest proportions of foreigners in the world.

I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore!