Age: 28.
Appearance: The Slightly Smaller Hadron Collider.
What is it? It's a particle collider, used by physicists, mostly for colliding particles. Until Cern's Large Hadron Collider came along, America's Tevatron was the largest and highest energy particle collider in the world.
How large are we talking here? A four mile long circular tunnel under the prairie just east of Batavia, Illinois.
That's pretty big. Not compared with the 17 miles of the LHC. The two were competing to find the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle".
Were? Were. It's now a one-horse race.
Oh dear. I'm guessing bad things are happening to this Tevatron now there's a bigger kid on the block? Bad things indeed. Its federal funding was cut in January and it has been slowly winding down ever since. Last Friday, designer Dr Helen Edwards brought its atom-smashing days to a close, unceremoniously slamming its final beam of particles into a block of solid metal.
What will become of it? Parts will be removed and sent to Cern and other facilities, and the Fermilab site – where around 100 jobs have been lost – will be used for other smaller experiments.
Does it leave behind a good legacy? Oh yes. There would be no LHC without the Tevatron. The Tev pioneered the use of superconducting magnets to keep particle beams travelling in a circle.
What did they do before that? They just bumped into walls.
I meant the physicists. They bumped into walls too.
So did the Tev discover anything useful? It did indeed: the top quark, the tau neutrino and six bound states of the b-quark, among others.
Wow! I use all of those every day! What will I do without it? You'll just have to be needlessly and ignorantly sarcastic about the LHC instead.
Do say: "For every particle collider built, there is an equal and opposite particle collider shut down."
Don't say: "A physicist's career in motion remains in motion unless acted on by a funding cut."
