Research at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider began today at 13:06 CEST, when beams collided at 7 TeV. This is a groundbreaking moment in particle physics — indeed in science itself. The research promises to give scientists insight into the earliest moments of the life of the universe and to shed light on some of the deepest and murkiest mysteries of the structure of matter and energy. This is the kind of wonderful news that makes me proud to be a human being.

While I celebrate this remarkable achievement, I feel regret that the United States abandoned its own Superconducting Super Collider seventeen years ago. Capable of producing almost triple the energies of the LHC, the SSC would have provided even more of the kinds of insights the LHC will soon offer to humankind, but over a decade sooner. It would have also cemented the USA’s, rather than Europe’s, lead in physics research. The SSC project was cancelled due to budget overruns. Originally, scoped at $4 billion, it ran to $12 billion before being shut down. It seemed like a foolish decision to me to stop the project then, and in today’s world of $1 trillion budgets, it seems even more so.

In a commentary on CNN.com, John Feehery rants a bit about the implications of Al Franken being seated as Minnesota Senator, giving Senate democrats a filibuster-proof majority. I won’t get into the politics of the discussion since this is a tech blog, but I had to laugh at Feehery’s dire warns that the Democrats would soon crumble under the weight of their own power. Yes, according to Feehery, Senate Dems will overreach their bounds, trying to impose evil things on an unwary public. Dreaded things. Horrible things. Things like … the metric system.

What is it about human nature that makes us pick what is easy over what is smart?

There are a few things Americans are uniquely attached to in this regard. We just got over our desperate clinging to standard-definition television (HDTV has been about 20 years in the planning, and they still were trying to delay the digital broadcast mandate at the last minute). We keep indulging our “love affair with the automobile” (i.e., choosing cars with big, powerful engines instead of economical, fuel-efficient ones) even though it endangers our economy, our national security and our environment. But nothing is so uniquely American as is our ridiculously outmoded system of measurement “US Customary Units”.

Seriously, at this point it’s an international embarrassment that we’re only one of three countries on the entire planet that hasn’t adopted the metric system (more precisely the International System of Units or SI) as the standard system of measurement. Yup, it’s just us, Liberia and Myanmar. That’s just awesome!

Our best scientific minds aren’t even exposed to SI in any great depth generally until high school. Why are we content to lag behind the rest of the world with our stupid 12-inches-to-a-foot mentality? We have a trillion dollars to bail out banks, but we have no money for NASA to convert to metric? Though there is a cost associated with switching to metric, isn’t the potential gain greater still?

Really Smart Way: 1 millimeter x 1000 = 1 meter; 1 meter x 1000 = 1 kilometer
Really Dumb Way: 1 inch x 12 = 1 foot; 1 foot x 3 = 1 yard; 1 yard x 1760 = 1 mile

So, if the worst thing you can imagine that Al Franken and the Senate Democrats want to do is convert the US to the metric system, I say let’s do the smart thing. No matter how hard it may seem, we can do it. After all, we’re Americans.