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The way I heard it, Cern could be considered to be indirectly financed by the war machine as it was essentially provided as a playground for Europe’s atomic sci
by mpclark 6y ago
The way I heard it, Cern could be considered to be indirectly financed by the war machine as it was essentially provided as a playground for Europe’s atomic scientists to stop any one nation running away with the ball.
- iguy 6y agoYes there is some truth in this, I think. It seemed entirely plausible (at least to politicians) in the 50s that the scientists might well come up with something else on the scale of the bomb.
- ncmncm 6y agoSimilarly ITER and the whole fusion research project is a jobs program to maintain a population of high-neutron-flux physicists to draw on for weapons work. (There will be no fusion power.) But has anything useful spun off? Maybe plasma dynamics maths. Inertial confinement drove development of short-pulse lasers, which are good for research into chemical reaction dynamics.