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

[Elok]

No I don't accept that flawed principle. Advancing scientific knowledge is a worthwhile pursuit in its own right, and the added benefits it brings in terms of opening up new avenues of technologic discovery makes it doubly valuable. Todays 'pointless' research leads to tomorrows wonder drug/new energy source/new method of transportation/new communications device/etc etc etc.

Beware of confirmation bias. Some pure research leads to surprising technological dividends, but how much of it leads nowhere in particular? Also, how long will it take for our confirmation of the Higgs Boson to pay off with an application, and how useful will it be compared to the more immediate applications of, say, dumping cash into new materials technologies? Actually, come to think of it, materials technology might not need much government money, but you get my point, I hope.

[DaShi]

It's not a good point. Pure research isn't about expected results. It about the accumulation of knowledge that can later put to applied science. You speak as if we should know exactly what pure research will produce, as if Democritus should have predicted the H-bomb or Obama's 2008 victory. However, that's rarely the case. Once the phenomenon is better understood, then the flow of ideas occurs. So, asking questions like how long until this pays off is unproductive and arrogantly naive. The better question is: now that we know this, what can we do?

[Elok]

Actually, it's hard to envision any discovery in physics that wouldn't be technologically useful after enough time passed and technology caught up with theory. Be that as it may, if there's limited funding for research I'd rather it go to something that offers a definite, useful application. Like those scientists who were planning to inject designer molecules into people with cancer, and then the molecules build up in the tumors due to cancer cells' freakish, inconsistent structure, and then they fire a beam of some sort and it heats up the special molecules and burns out the tumor without harming any normal tissues. (deep breath)

I don't know where I read about that, or recall how long ago it was, but I would be totally okay with all the LHC money going to those dudes instead.

[Jon Miller]

Because it pays Jon's salary?

Actually, it doesn't.

However, I would think the LHC is more important to the human endeavor to learn about our universe than IceCube.

JM

[Jon Miller]

Way more funding goes to medical applications/etc than goes to fundamental research. Fundamental research is just a small component of the research budgets. Note that a big experiment that pays 1/2 the particle physics cost 6b with much smaller per year expenses (and that is world wide, not just the US).

In 2005 medical spending in just the US was ~100b per year.
"Total U.S. spending on medical research has doubled in the past decade to nearly $95 billion a year, though whether the money is being well spent needs much better scrutiny, a study has found."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9407342/ns/health-health_care/t/billion-year-spent-medical-research/#.T_kl6isti5M

I know that in medical spending they will spend 10x (or more) for something than if they waited 10 years (for the physicists, for things like proton therapy, note that proton therapy and the like are things that as far as I can determine we would never have had applications of without basic research pushing the frontiers... there was just no reason to have developed accelerator technology for reasons other than basic research).

JM
(For Proton Therapy, from 2000-2010 when most hospital places were built the price was 200m for one, for Loma Linda's (SDA hospital built the first in 1990), the price was ?XXX (I can't find the price, but someone told me in 2001 it was enormous), soon the price will be ~30m)

[ricketyclik]

What exactly does astronomy have to do with accident rates?

[Dauphin]

Why should we assume they would have been? Some like cordless tools would have turned up because they have obvious earth bound advantages, but there's no guarantee some of the others would. Basically I just find the idea of limiting research to things we already know will have practical outcomes to be ridiculous. If we'd followed that approach throughout history we'd still be living like cavemen.

If we follow this logic, there are technologies today that we don't have because time and money was spent on space missions instead of alternative, cheaper, "blue sky" technologies (manned undersea and ocean exploration research say, or more advanced unmanned space research).

[ricketyclik]

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

[Dauphin]

Have you spent the last two and half hours reading this thread, or just the Asher back catalogue?

[ricketyclik]

Have you spent the last two and half hours reading this thread, or just the Asher back catalogue?

I read some and then came back and read some more. Asher's pretty funny eh?

If nothing else, the LHC has resulted in this thread, in which the prospect of publicly funded blowjobs was raised. I think that idea has legs, and predict that it will become a reality. Hence, investment in the LHC has more than paid for itself already.

Publicly funded blowjobs

[kentonio]

When is the Higgs Boson going to lead to any of those things? If it won't for another hundred years then why build a giant collider now instead of in fifty or eighty years? And why should I believe that knowing whether the Higgs Boson exists is intrinsically good?

How does waiting achieve anything other than to mean that any applications that do arrive will be held up by another fifty to eighty years?

If we follow this logic, there are technologies today that we don't have because time and money was spent on space missions instead of alternative, cheaper, "blue sky" technologies (manned undersea and ocean exploration research say, or more advanced unmanned space research).

This is actually a fair point, but I think that's why it's worthwhile pushing ahead with as many different areas as possible and putting larger investments into areas that show promise. Not necessarily areas that look most likely to provide actual applications (although we do that too) but also areas that can unlock new discoveries, with the understanding that they may well bring forth new applications or areas of research.

It's tricky because no-one wants to piss away billions and not achieve anything, but when large numbers of scientists say that investment could lead to something worthwhile, I think it's more valuable to listen to those guys who actually know what they're talking about, rather than try and apply some beancounting cost/benefit analysis that only considers practical applications. That feels short sighted.

[self biased]

so let me get this straight: Kuciwalker thinks that six billion dollars is a lot money compared to the economic output of the entire world?

[giblets]

How does waiting achieve anything other than to mean that any applications that do arrive will be held up by another fifty to eighty years?

How does doing these experiments now magically give us the capability of actually using information about the Higgs Boson for something?

[kentonio]

How does doing these experiments now magically give us the capability of actually using information about the Higgs Boson for something?

Who said it did? You can't argue that we should wait decades before doing research however unless you admit that you're also holding up any potential applications by a matching timescale. Higgs Boson might not lead to anything practical, but there's no saying that discoveries based on that knowledge could.

[giblets]

Who said it did? You can't argue that we should wait decades before doing research however unless you admit that you're also holding up any potential applications by a matching timescale. Higgs Boson might not lead to anything practical, but there's no saying that discoveries based on that knowledge could.

Why would I "admit" that practical applications are being held up when there are none?