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

[dannubis]

Compared to 1 military plane? No.

This.

[Kuciwalker]

Compared to 1 military plane? No.

Why the **** is this relevant? Do you actually think I'm proposing we redirect these funds to the military?

[Lorizael]

Hardly. Anyone with the necessary talents to work on a project like this could just as easily study CS or electrical engineering and work in Silicon Valley - or really do almost anything requiring strong quantitative skills. Lorizael's notion of scientific specialization is wrong. Moreover, the very existence of the LHC has led people to pursue PhD's in useless areas of physics.

No, scientists are generally (heh) quite specialized... in science. The idea that they'd be able to do nothing else was said tongue in cheek, hence the smiley. Obviously, yes, they can work outside of theoretical and experimental science, but if they're going to choose to do science, then they're going to choose to do the science they're specialized in.

Why they choose to become scientists and do science is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, however. Personally, if there are people who are going to become scientists no matter what (which I think, to an extent, is true), I'd rather we have the resources in place to take advantage of that than to simply assume the science will get done later when it's cheaper to do so. Wasting limited scientific acumen seems quite inefficient.

[Kuciwalker]

No, scientists are generally (heh) quite specialized... in science. The idea that they'd be able to do nothing else was said tongue in cheek, hence the smiley. Obviously, yes, they can work outside of theoretical and experimental science, but if they're going to choose to do science, then they're going to choose to do the science they're specialized in.

Why they choose to become scientists and do science is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, however. Personally, if there are people who are going to become scientists no matter what (which I think, to an extent, is true), I'd rather we have the resources in place to take advantage of that than to simply assume the science will get done later when it's cheaper to do so. Wasting limited scientific acumen seems quite inefficient.

This is sophistry. We don't have some enormous stock of high-energy physicists who would require gargantuan investments of time and labor to retrain to do anything very useful in other areas of science, and the stock of high-energy physicists we do have exist largely because we allocated funding to things like the LHC. Had we never funded the LHC most of these people would have specialized in something else.

It really, really doesn't take that much time and effort to retrain a high-energy physicist to do something productive.

[The Mad Monk]

Like banking.

[Lorizael]

...the stock of high-energy physicists we do have exist largely because we allocated funding to things like the LHC. Had we never funded the LHC most of these people would have specialized in something else...

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? I didn't say I disagreed with it entirely, just that it's hard to tell what comes first. I'm willing to bet some prospective scientists go into high-energy physics because it's what post-grads have them do the grunt work on, who in turn will be working in fields that have received funding and support. But which fields receive funding and support is a result of scientists in those fields getting grant proposals approved, and there are going to be a number of scientists who are in fields for the mere fact that those fields interest them. I know of no data clearly demonstrating one way or the other which influence is more dominant.

But I do know that much of the interest in high-energy particle physics is a result of the Standard Model being hammered out (theoretically) decades ago, and experimentalists wanting to test those theories. I think it is inevitable that when testable theories are made, experimentalists will want to test them. Again, I think it's wasteful to not have the resources in place to allow for that.

[Asher]

If they had built a Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC), KH would still be in physics instead of investment banking.

[The Mad Monk]

Science without experimentation is philosophy.

[Ben Kenobi]

Compared to the alternative uses that the governments

So your argument is that they waste money, but it's ok if they waste money on something you like? Why not let the people who pay taxes keep their money?

[Ben Kenobi]

I think it's wasteful to not have the resources in place to allow for that.

I personally think it's wasteful to allocate those resources poorly. Look at SpaceX, why are we paying the government to run a space program when it can be much better done by private enterprise?

[Asher]

Science without experimentation is philosophy.

Zing!

[Asher]

I personally think it's wasteful to allocate those resources poorly. Look at SpaceX, why are we paying the government to run a space program when it can be much better done by private enterprise?

SpaceX and NASA are totally comparable and have contributed equally to society. NASA, like SpaceX, is only about space transport.

[Ben Kenobi]

Lorizael's notion of scientific specialization is wrong

Clearly, he's not a fan of Heinlein. If the folks that we are churning out are so specialized, then that's a dead loss. Sure, it's great if they hit exactly what they need, but I'm unconvinced that specializing to this degree is actually helpful.

[Ben Kenobi]

NASA, like SpaceX, is only about space transport.

Which is why we haven't been to the moon in the last 40 years? Maybe 40 years ago, Nasa was about Space EXPLORATION. They've devolved, but they are still choking down the same dollars. Where's the incentive to take on risk when they get paid the same to do nothing?

[Lorizael]

I personally think it's wasteful to allocate those resources poorly. Look at SpaceX, why are we paying the government to run a space program when it can be much better done by private enterprise?

The plurality of SpaceX's funding comes from a government-run space program.