The Superconducting Super Collider in Waxahatchie, Texaswas supposed to be where we'd discover the Higgs Boson. My wife's cousin was employed as an engineer there at the time before the budget ax. Thus, CERN and the Large Hadron Collider got the honor of discovering what gives mass well...mass.
Peter Higgs will likely get the Nobel Prize as will the researchers that confirmed his theories; Europe will become a Mecca of particle physics and science research. That will impact their educational curriculum, pedagogy and how they prepare their students to meet the demand of a complex world, learning how to problem solve, a skill becoming bereft in the US relegating evolution to "just [a] theory," the earth to 6,000 years old and the universe much younger despite the knowledge of light speed and the time it takes images to travel vast distances.
It is doubtful our relationship with money, politics and budgets will change in the foreseeable future. Fights in the echo chamber also known as "The Hill" will never get to a place that moves us forward as a nation, almost guaranteeing a stratified educational system that soon will not be able to produce talent beyond the usual privileged suspects, nor compete on a global level. We are soundbite-driven and jingoistic to inanity, fiddling as a modern Rome burns.
Unlike Star Trek, we won't evolve to just do science research for the greater good.
Such fantasies will be the providence of poets...and Trekkies.
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