"You know nothing of future time," pronounced Deep Thought, "and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to design."
—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
At a news conference in Beijing an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.
It would cost about $6.7
billion and 13,000 person-years of labor to build the machine, the group reported. And that does not include the cafeteria and parking.
—Dennis Overbye, "Price of Next Big Thing in Physics: $6.7 Billion," New York Times
Thanks, Erik M.!
