Anyone Else Staying Up For The CERN Announcement About The Higgs Boson Tonight?

[Guynemer]

It seems "we're a democracy" excuses any policy selected by our elected representatives.

Yes. Yes it does. It's the whole "government we deserve" principal.

[Lorizael]

We could do the same science for cheaper in the future. Why not wait? We aren't going to get anything useful out of doing it sooner rather than later.

The ability to do it cheaper in the future is not a terrible argument. The idea that we don't get anything useful doing it now rather than later, however, is pretty silly. What we get out of doing it sooner is any potential benefit that results from the research (however far off or indirect) sooner. Duh.

[Jon Miller]

Doing it now instead of later saves us a huge amount on other experiments which we could be doing which could be nonsense to do depending on what we see at LHC.

JM

[MikeH]

The problem isn't funding general scientific knowledge. The problem is funding useless general scientific knowledge just because it sounds really science-y.

Luckily there's no such thing as useless general scientific knowledge.

Only a fool would suggest that just because we don't know what the practical applications of something might be yet, there can't be any.

[Kuciwalker]

The ability to do it cheaper in the future is not a terrible argument. The idea that we don't get anything useful doing it now rather than later, however, is pretty silly. What we get out of doing it sooner is any potential benefit that results from the research (however far off or indirect) sooner. Duh.

No, the benefits from this can't be anything but far off. We can't use the research now. This entire subfield of physics is basically pointless until engineering begins to catch up with it, which won't be for a long time.

[Kuciwalker]

Luckily there's no such thing as useless general scientific knowledge.

Sure there is.

Only a fool would suggest that just because we don't know what the practical applications of something might be yet, there can't be any.

There can't be any that we can use right now. There can't be anything that we can use before the distant future.

[Lorizael]

No, the benefits from this can't be anything but far off. We can't use the research now. This entire subfield of physics is basically pointless until engineering begins to catch up with it, which won't be for a long time.

I can easily imagine scenarios in which the engineering won't catch up with the science until we know the science better.

[Asher]

It's my understanding that this kind of discovery directs future research, which is helpful in many ways.

[Jon Miller]

Kuci would never have supported studying astronomy...

JM

[Asher]

What exactly does astronomy have to do with accident rates?

[Jon Miller]

It's my understanding that this kind of discovery directs future research, which is helpful in many ways.

Definitely, maybe most importantly by knowing what experiments to prioritize for the future.

Scientific inquiry is a good in and of itself, but if we were all looking for cold fusion/dark matter/evidence of string theory, no real progress could be made.

JM

[Kuciwalker]

Kuci would never have supported studying astronomy...

JM

Astronomy is cheap, modern stuff like the Hubble notwithstanding. CERN is expensive.

[Asher]

Astronomy is cheap

Well, if you ask one famous astronomer, it cost him his freedom.

[Jon Miller]

Astronomy is cheap, modern stuff like the Hubble notwithstanding. CERN is expensive.

Compared to 1 military plane? No.

http://www.lhc.ac.uk/17716.aspx

2) How much did the LHC cost and who pays?

The direct total LHC project cost is £2.6bn, made up of:

the collider (£2.1bn)
the detectors (£575m)
The total cost is shared mainly by CERN's 20 Member States, with significant contributions from the six observer nations.

The UK pays ~£95m per year as our annual subscription to CERN.

The LHC project involves 111 nations in designing, building and testing equipment and software, participating in experiments and analysing data. The degree of involvement varies between countries, with some able to contribute more financial and human resource than others.

If one nation did it, I might agree. But spread over 26 nations (more, really), no.

JM

[Jon Miller]

For the US:

" federal agencies provide about a total of about $60 million per year to support work on the ATLAS and CMS experiments." and there are a lot of applied benefits due to magnet/etc technology.

Really, it is much more efficient than a lot of military based science.

more defense: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/articl...09/defense-lhc

JM