Newsweek: The Large Hadron Collider

The Christian GOD does not tolerate Doubting Thomases.

Tee hee.

Particle physics is well past its first youth, and I can't recall a single technologically useful result it's generated since about Fermi's day--or is there something I've missed? It's primarily an aesthetic activity.

There are lots better ways to spend a billion or two dollars on science than building ever larger colliders. If we really have to find the Higgs boson, maybe support work on wake field accelerators or other new methods, because keeping on turning the same old crank has got us way, way into the diminishing returns region.

The argument seems to be that we have to keep dumping some obscenely large fraction of our limited physical science budgets into accelerators to avoid falling behind in a field that doesn't produce anything useful...or to avoid losing the expertise of the field because there's no new data...come again? There's really no sense in encouraging that many smart people to pour their careers down a rat hole like that, data or no data.

I'm all for the search for origins and so on, but it's only worth spending so many billion bucks on such a brute force approach to a primarily aesthetic goal, particularly when it's in competition with much more valuable work that could train lots more people for lots less money.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

The SSC was started under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

SSC was cancelled in 1993 by the 103rd Congress President pro tempore of the Senate Robert Byrd (D) Speaker of the House Tom Foley (D)

President Bill Clinton tried to stop it but went along. Sigh. I remember being very unhappy at the time. Maybe if they had had the foresight to build it in Arkansas ....

--Mike Jr

Young puppies like Brian Cox are crowing about reproducing the Big Bang and babbling about "seeing creation". If ever a kid had his head in cloud nine he does. I'm not against research either, but I don't need the hype.

Phil, I totally agree! There's way too much hype for the refurbished LHC. The only thing I'm expecting out of this hugh machine is the mass of the Higgs boson. It harldy seems worth it. I expect more exciting results to come from astronomy/ cosmology. The particle physics community has a great PR machine though... George

Before radios, telegraphs, electric motors, etc, etc, Queen Victoria once asked British physicist Michael Faraday of what use his studies in electricity and magnetism were. He famously replied, "Madam, of what use is a baby?"

Of what use is the ISS?

-- Paul Hovnanian snipped-for-privacy@hovnanian.com

----------------------------------------------------------------------- Have gnu, will travel.

Maybe we need prediction markets to fund basic research.

Look on the bright side; we could make money off of all the Groups Google one-stars! Like taking candy from a baby.

--Mike Jr

So....the higgs bosen was invented to explain mass. So..how come it has mass itself. Seems a bit like darkness to me...

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@kevinaylward.co.uk

Zero. Spam in a can, looking for something to do, which is mostly to stay alive. The new moon rocket thing is even sillier, since we've been there already and nothing's going on.

For the price of the ISS and the death-trap shuttles, we could fund hundreds of world-class telescopes, launch scores of unmanned space and planetary probes, or defend the Earth from the next comet/asteroid strike.

John

Well, for example the World Wide Web? Although, it is not directly a result of particle physics, but it still is a by-product of CERN's activities.

And there are a lot of useful technologies which have emerged from accelerators/particle physics, for example cancer therapy, several analysis methods in material science, which are widely used in engineering too. Even ion-implantors used in the semicon industry have at least had a positive boost from accelerator techniques.

Whether this is a justification to spend so much money on the LHC is another discussion.

Klaus

They're trying to develop a "grand unified theory of everything" while excluding the Creator of Everything. )-;

Thanks, Rich

I don't know - what did Queen Victoria expect Columbus to find?

Thanks, Rich

The word phlogiston was allready being used :(

martin

I doubt she ever met him.

John

John

Especially since Columbus had been dead a couple hundred years when Victoria was born.

Couldn't "they" stop the war for a day or two, that would give NASA quite a lot of money?

martin

Uh, no. The moment he was elected, Bush stabbed his campaign manager (former Illinois Governor Jim Thompson) in the back by deciding the SSC should be built in Texas, despite the billions of dollars that would be saved by building it onto the existing facilities at Fermilab.

The Democrats correctly saw the SSC as just another pork project for Bush's friends and rightly cancelled it. It was a decision that had nothing to do with science, which is the real shame.

Next time don't vote for Republicans who don't give a s*it whether stuff works as long as they get paid for it.