6 ms·

>to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful This is infuriating. A negative result is a

by indrax 15y ago

>to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful This is infuriating. A negative result is a successful experiment. Don't hamper efforts to fund science with the argument that science might figure out it was wrong. Europe explored the universe where America did not.

jamesaguilar 15y ago
> Europe explored the universe where America did not. What did they get out of it? (Honest question.) Also, supposing the Higg's Boson did exist and this experiment found it, how much benefit would the average European derived? How much less benefit would people from other countries enjoy?
- lucasjung 15y ago
  Indeed. The question isn't, "Did this experiment advance scientific knowledge," the question is, "Was this a prudent and appropriate use of tax money, especially in light of the enormous opportunity costs inherent in any expenditure of tax money?"
  - henrikschroder 15y ago
    That is ridiculous, ROI is relevant if you're talking about applied research where you have a short-term goal and can make the calculation. But the LHC is basic research, you can't do ROI calculations on that. Instead, you dump as much money as you can into it, and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it.
    - jamesaguilar 15y ago
      > and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it. How do you know that? Has all blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?
      - bane 15y ago
        Has all blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line? That's the wrong question. "Has blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?" is a better one and the answer is a most definitive yes, many many many times the amount of money put into it, on the order of trillions of dollars. Do each and every blue sky pure R&D experiment yield such results? Heck no! Neither does any known investment vehicle.
        jamesaguilar 15y ago
        > That's the wrong question. I asked the question I meant to ask. The point is not that we should stop doing blue sky research if examples exist where it has produced no benefit. It is quite obvious that blue sky research has been useful to us over the course of time. That fact does not give anything called blue sky research carte blanche to spend taxpayer money. The point is to weigh the likely benefits of all the various types of blue sky research available to us at any given time and try to spend more on research that is likely to be useful. > Neither does any known investment vehicle. And like any investment vehicle, I ask that we consider whether any given piece of blue sky research is likely to appreciate or be a money sink. This was, if you'll read back, my original query. I don't understand why the people in this forum consider this question so outrageous.
        delackner 15y ago
        The difficulty is that much of the time, blue sky research projects appear at the time they are being funded, to have absolutely no known possible applications, nor any sense that future applications will come along. It is not possible in the present to know what the benefit will be. This is basically the definition of basic research, and if we just said "ok, no funding for stuff that has no known application" then we would be sitting around with very very smooth wheels on our carriages.
        wlievens 15y ago
        > I ask that we consider whether any given piece of blue sky research is likely to appreciate or be a money sink Good idea in theory perhaps, but how do you suggest to make that assessment?
    - lucasjung 15y ago
      >...you can't do ROI calculations on that. Instead, you dump as much money as you can into it, and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it. I could apply this quote to all kinds of other ways of spending money, and it would hold true (e.g. infrastructure or social programs). And while you can't do ROI calculations on long-range programs, you can make informed decisions about which are more likely to provide the greatest benefits. In fact, if you are talking about spending billions of dollars of other people's money, you have a moral and ethical obligation to do exactly that.
  - D_Alex 15y ago
    Yes, yes, good question. People who make the decisions to spend money on this scale - US$ 9 billion! - must be well qualified to make such decisions, and do so after careful consideration of various alternatives. I think it was the right decision. Of course opportunity cost must be considered - you could have had, instead: 1 new Nimitz class aircraft carrier (without the air wing), OR 4 new B-2 bombers OR 1 extra week of Bush tax cuts....
    - jamesaguilar 15y ago
      > people . . . must be well qualified . . . [so we should trust them]. Surely not an argument from authority. Before we can accept this reasoning, we have to have proof that the people allocating the research funds have interests that well match those of the public, not just the scientific community, and we must also have proof that they have a good track record of applying those interests to ends that match them.
      - D_Alex 15y ago
        No, not an argument from authority, but an appeal for putting the "right" people in positions of authority. What I meant was "people must be well qualified (and also consider alternatives carefully ) so that we CAN trust them".
      - wlievens 15y ago
        "must" meant "should" in his sentence, not "are definitely".
- fragsworth 15y ago
  Suppose they got absolutely nothing out of it. This shouldn't matter. You cannot easily predict what rewards will come as a result of cutting-edge scientific research. It's a gamble. However, due to all the technologies we have right now as a result of expensive government spending on research, the general consensus is (or at least should be) that the benefits FAR outweigh the costs.
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    > It's a gamble. Even gambles have odds. And, to me at least, it does matter if we get something valuable out of our tax dollars. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some slobbering hard-line libertarian who believes that any experiment with a negative result is wasted money. On the other hand, if the odds are that a positive or negative result is nowhere likely to benefit the public in a concrete manner (either directly or via its successor events and discoveries), then I do question whether it's wise to spend money on it.
    - wtallis 15y ago
      If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. It would be engineering. You can't make valid predictions about the expected benefit of any single experiment before running it for the first time. All we have to go on is the history of major scientific undertakings, and the technologies they have eventually lead to. That history primarily shows two things: sustained serious scientific research correlates with technological advances and breakthroughs, and governments are usually the only ones willing and able to throw large amounts of cash at a project for a long time before the results start coming in or making money.
      - jamesaguilar 15y ago
        > If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. Not so. For example, it was hypothesized long before the first human-initiated fission event that the energy from fission would possibly be useful for creating a bomb. The research and physics that went into actually developing the thing was still cutting edge even though predictions had been made about its long term practical applications.
- mgualt 15y ago
  What they got out of it was a) gaining a greater knowledge about the way our world functions, b) training a new generation of scientists at a level of advanced research which goes beyond what was previously achieved. c) developed an advanced engineering industry which has broken new ground in materials science, not only in superconductivity and cooling, but in practically all engineering disciplines. d) developed a new level of sophistication in computer analysis and processing ability. Many universities and advanced research facilities around the world contribute to a project as large as LHC, so the benefits are spread worldwide. However the location of LHC makes a huge impact on the scientific abilities and human resources of Europe. As for how much benefit the average European derives from LHC, the question is really how much they benefit from the advancement of general scientific ability and human resources. Besides the innumerable everyday fruits of the advancement of science which average people enjoy today as compared with, say, 1803, there is the even more important fact that their future ability to establish a high quality of life, and to solve major problems, depends on their having an incredible skill and wisdom in dealing with the actual, factual world.
- robryan 15y ago
  I think it's far to early to start talking about the LHC's value in a past tense.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- icarus_drowning 15y ago
  This is, I think, a dishonest question, because we can't know "what they [got] out of it". There is a 5% probability that they might "get something out of it" in the future, and an unknown (likely greater than zero) probability that they will "get" a great deal out of it through readjustments of previously invincible models of how the universe is constructed. Remember, we're trying to figure out why things have mass here, (which, I think, is rather prima facia a very important question to answer) and if we're wrong about how that phenomenon arises, we now have a very big clue to look somewhere else. In short, they got petabytes of data out of it, and frankly, that will most likely prove to be invaluable in and of itself.
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    > we can't know "what they [got] out of it" Of course not. Only when this is ancient history will we truly know the results of the experiment in a practical sense. But we can hazard guesses, and if we are informed (which I am not) those guesses have some chance of being right. Anyway, your consequent doesn't follow: an inability to know the concrete answer to any given question does not make the question dishonest. > which, I think, is rather prima facia a very important question to answer Important for what purpose? Human happiness? Some concrete goal of technology or economics? The abstract advancement of knowledge? Some mix of all of these things? I agree that it would be nice to know where mass comes from, but that fact absent any useful application (or a probability of a useful application) is of limited value to me. > that will most likely prove to be invaluable in and of itself It is hard for me to believe that the data itself will be something anyone would be willing to pay money for. Do you mean invaluable in some other sense?
    - icarus_drowning 15y ago
      I agree that it would be nice to know where mass comes from, but that fact absent any useful application (or a probability of a useful application) is of limited value to me. I guess if you don't see potential applications of understanding where mass comes from, we're at a bit of an impasse here. It is difficult (if not impossible) to make predictions about what the discovery will bring, but the mere possibility that this research could or might lead to the ability to manipulate mass seems rather valuable to me, in many concrete ways. [UPDATE: I guess if you want to see this as a gamble, you need to take into account the very good track record of abstract scientific discovery leading to enormous benefits. Given that understanding electricity, magnetism, relativity, and countless other scientific discoveries have brought incalculable value to the human race, I guess I don't understand why one wouldn't believe that science was worth the gamble.]
- rorrr 15y ago
  What they got out of it is that the standard model and supersymmetry are (likely) wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Higgs_boson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Higgs_boson EDIT: actually it looks like they only searched a partial range of energies, there's still a chance to find it.
- patrickyeon 15y ago
  There are a number of replies telling you that a better understanding of physics is what we get out of this. I completely agree, but that argument won't convince everybody. I don't have numbers at hand, but a large amount of the data the detectors spew out is un-necessary, and needs to be sorted quickly (think real-time or very nearly), so that the back end computing resources can actually keep up with storing it. There is a huge grid infrastructure (data transfer and compute resources) dedicated to the LHC. The problems the scientists and engineers had to solve to get the LHC running will come up in some shape down the road, and we'll benefit from this. We can list off a whole lot of advances that were made for pure science that are ridiculously useful for us today (spectroscopy, lasers, atomic clocks, nuclear reactors, even particle accelerators, off the top of my head). We may also wish to keep in mind that solving the infrastructure problems scientists face also gives society great payoffs.
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    I thank you for your point about advances made from pure scientific research before. However, I think in many of these cases some applications of the pure research were hypothesized as well, long before the pure research was actually completed. I worry that we are simply picking examples of blue sky research that ended up being practical, and ignoring examples that were not because they are less available. (Which makes sense, since research that had no practical use would probably not come to mind when you try to think of examples where research ended up having a practical use.) Of course, even such a conclusion would not suggest that we should cease all blue sky research. Obviously that would be very silly. But it might make sense to think about whether it is possible to guess ahead of time what research is likely to have practical benefits and what research is not. This way we can spend more money on research likely to have benefits and less on research that is probably useless except for the knowledge's own sake.
    - mturmon 15y ago
      I'm baffled by your last paragraph ("it might make sense to think about whether it is possible to guess ahead of time what research is likely to have practical benefits and what research is not"). You seem to think that a $10B collider was built just because it was possible, not as part of a deliberative/strategic process, partly influenced by a European/American contest for intellectual leadership in this area? Surely you know that the worldwide particle physics community has been contemplating the value of this research for about 20 years? (Since the SSC planning stages.) And that European political bodies have deliberated it at length? I'm not in that community, but my friends who are, are spending a lot of time in Geneva the last couple of years! The value of bringing all that talent in to contribute ideas, and some of them to stay for years, is hard to estimate, but it must be huge. I'm sure Europe is a great place for physics PhDs and postdocs these days.
- msie 15y ago
  Don't forget the thousands of jobs created and billions injected into the economy. It's not like the money was dumped into a volcano.
  - orangecat 15y ago
    If work doesn't produce anything of value (which isn't the case here, just hypothetically), then the "created" jobs are bad for the economy because they divert resources from productive areas. It's another form of the broken window fallacy.
  - iwwr 15y ago
    Job creation is just about the worst 'benefit' that can be ascribed to a project. Practically any expenditure can be tied to it. Using this argument just puts your project on par with digging ditches and filling them back again. This is not something a LHC promoter should be proud of, in and of itself.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  In response to this and your subsequent posts: First, let's draw an analogy to the territorial expansion of the human race. Engineering is like building cities, while basic research is like exploration and mapping. Before Columbus set sail there was an inkling that he might be able to find something of value, but nobody knew whether it would be gold, spices, etc., and certainly nobody foresaw the creation of an eventual world superpower. Plus, city builders need explorers to identify suitable sites for new cities, and to make sure that an expanding city isn't about to run itself off a cliff (or into some other unforeseen territorial hazard). Second, imagine that engineering is like exploring a pitch black cave. Basic research is a flashlight we can shine in various directions. Engineers can make incremental steps forward, but without science lighting the way, we won't know whether we're about to run into a wall. Third, grandiose projects like the LHC or ISS serve as an inspiration to scientists and engineers in all fields. Even if the primary activity of a giant project yields no useful results ("Not finding the Higgs" in the case of the LHC, and "Being in space" in the case of ISS), the supporting research and engineering teams will develop useful technologies to solve related problems (like the grid computing systems others have mentioned). To sum up, basic research like that done at the LHC is necessary to expand the possible solution space for further scientific research and engineering. The further we push the limits of human understanding, the more branching-off points we create for the minds of applied scientists and engineers. The more different things we have to think about, the more likely we are to think useful thoughts that haven't been thought before. We need the LHC et. al. to be at the forefront of knowledge to provide plenty of well-traversed, fertile ground for applied science and engineering.
- arethuza 15y ago
  "What did they get out of it?" As you read this you are using one of the direct benefits of Europe's funding for CERN two decades ago.
craigmccaskill 15y ago
Indeed. Bean-counters are looking at things totally upside down. A few billion to further the human understanding of the world around us vs the 1.4 trillion spent on the war effort. I know which I'd rather have backed.
tzs 15y ago
> Europe explored the universe where America did not I guess you never heard of a little project called the International Space Station? The SSC was supposed to be a $4 billion project. That's what Congress was told in 1987. By 1993, it was projected as a $12 billion project. Guess where that $8 billion would have come from if the SSC project had continued? From other science projects--and most likely the ISS would have been the first on the chopping block. America continued exploring the universe just fine--but with a broad approach instead of putting everything toward exploring one narrow area. We're seeing a repeat of this with the new space telescope, although the outcome may be different this time. The projected costs have grown massively, and the projected launch date has been pushed WAY out. It's been defunded this year, with Congress specifically calling it out by name as to receive no funding. The Congressman who put that language in has said that this is meant to be a warning to the project's managers that they need to get their act together, and then funding can come back.
- ugh 15y ago
  You could call it division of labor. The US will obviously benefit from any discoveries the LHC makes, Europe will also benefit from the ISS.
  - idlewords 15y ago
    It's comforting to hear you say that someone will benefit from the ISS, since so far it's been a dead loss.
    - ugh 15y ago
      Well, I’m not all that convinced of the usefulness of the ISS myself, I was trying to make a more abstract point. If there are significant scientific discoveries to be made on the ISS, the Europeans will also benefit from them.
      - Eyght 15y ago
        If you look into commercial space research, you'll find that a lot of it (maybe most) is done under non-disclosure. We usually don't get to hear about it until there is a successful product to show.
borism 15y ago
Funny, cause if the Spanish crown didn't fund Columbuses search for alternative route to East-Indies, we wouldn't be talking about American science right now.
- wlievens 15y ago
  Really? So that huge continent on the other side of the Atlantic would have remained undiscovered for five hundred more years?
  - xdissent 15y ago
    Yes. It would only be discoverable from space.

by indrax 15y ago

jamesaguilar 15y ago

> Europe explored the universe where America did not. What did they get out of it? (Honest question.) Also, supposing the Higg's Boson did exist and this experiment found it, how much benefit would the average European derived? How much less benefit would people from other countries enjoy?

lucasjung 15y ago
Indeed. The question isn't, "Did this experiment advance scientific knowledge," the question is, "Was this a prudent and appropriate use of tax money, especially in light of the enormous opportunity costs inherent in any expenditure of tax money?"
- henrikschroder 15y ago
  That is ridiculous, ROI is relevant if you're talking about applied research where you have a short-term goal and can make the calculation. But the LHC is basic research, you can't do ROI calculations on that. Instead, you dump as much money as you can into it, and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it.
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    > and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it. How do you know that? Has all blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?
    - bane 15y ago
      Has all blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line? That's the wrong question. "Has blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?" is a better one and the answer is a most definitive yes, many many many times the amount of money put into it, on the order of trillions of dollars. Do each and every blue sky pure R&D experiment yield such results? Heck no! Neither does any known investment vehicle.
      - jamesaguilar 15y ago
        > That's the wrong question. I asked the question I meant to ask. The point is not that we should stop doing blue sky research if examples exist where it has produced no benefit. It is quite obvious that blue sky research has been useful to us over the course of time. That fact does not give anything called blue sky research carte blanche to spend taxpayer money. The point is to weigh the likely benefits of all the various types of blue sky research available to us at any given time and try to spend more on research that is likely to be useful. > Neither does any known investment vehicle. And like any investment vehicle, I ask that we consider whether any given piece of blue sky research is likely to appreciate or be a money sink. This was, if you'll read back, my original query. I don't understand why the people in this forum consider this question so outrageous.
        delackner 15y ago
        The difficulty is that much of the time, blue sky research projects appear at the time they are being funded, to have absolutely no known possible applications, nor any sense that future applications will come along. It is not possible in the present to know what the benefit will be. This is basically the definition of basic research, and if we just said "ok, no funding for stuff that has no known application" then we would be sitting around with very very smooth wheels on our carriages.
        wlievens 15y ago
        > I ask that we consider whether any given piece of blue sky research is likely to appreciate or be a money sink Good idea in theory perhaps, but how do you suggest to make that assessment?
  - lucasjung 15y ago
    >...you can't do ROI calculations on that. Instead, you dump as much money as you can into it, and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it. I could apply this quote to all kinds of other ways of spending money, and it would hold true (e.g. infrastructure or social programs). And while you can't do ROI calculations on long-range programs, you can make informed decisions about which are more likely to provide the greatest benefits. In fact, if you are talking about spending billions of dollars of other people's money, you have a moral and ethical obligation to do exactly that.
- D_Alex 15y ago
  Yes, yes, good question. People who make the decisions to spend money on this scale - US$ 9 billion! - must be well qualified to make such decisions, and do so after careful consideration of various alternatives. I think it was the right decision. Of course opportunity cost must be considered - you could have had, instead: 1 new Nimitz class aircraft carrier (without the air wing), OR 4 new B-2 bombers OR 1 extra week of Bush tax cuts....
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    > people . . . must be well qualified . . . [so we should trust them]. Surely not an argument from authority. Before we can accept this reasoning, we have to have proof that the people allocating the research funds have interests that well match those of the public, not just the scientific community, and we must also have proof that they have a good track record of applying those interests to ends that match them.
    - D_Alex 15y ago
      No, not an argument from authority, but an appeal for putting the "right" people in positions of authority. What I meant was "people must be well qualified (and also consider alternatives carefully ) so that we CAN trust them".
    - wlievens 15y ago
      "must" meant "should" in his sentence, not "are definitely".
fragsworth 15y ago
Suppose they got absolutely nothing out of it. This shouldn't matter. You cannot easily predict what rewards will come as a result of cutting-edge scientific research. It's a gamble. However, due to all the technologies we have right now as a result of expensive government spending on research, the general consensus is (or at least should be) that the benefits FAR outweigh the costs.
- jamesaguilar 15y ago
  > It's a gamble. Even gambles have odds. And, to me at least, it does matter if we get something valuable out of our tax dollars. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some slobbering hard-line libertarian who believes that any experiment with a negative result is wasted money. On the other hand, if the odds are that a positive or negative result is nowhere likely to benefit the public in a concrete manner (either directly or via its successor events and discoveries), then I do question whether it's wise to spend money on it.
  - wtallis 15y ago
    If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. It would be engineering. You can't make valid predictions about the expected benefit of any single experiment before running it for the first time. All we have to go on is the history of major scientific undertakings, and the technologies they have eventually lead to. That history primarily shows two things: sustained serious scientific research correlates with technological advances and breakthroughs, and governments are usually the only ones willing and able to throw large amounts of cash at a project for a long time before the results start coming in or making money.
    - jamesaguilar 15y ago
      > If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. Not so. For example, it was hypothesized long before the first human-initiated fission event that the energy from fission would possibly be useful for creating a bomb. The research and physics that went into actually developing the thing was still cutting edge even though predictions had been made about its long term practical applications.
mgualt 15y ago
What they got out of it was a) gaining a greater knowledge about the way our world functions, b) training a new generation of scientists at a level of advanced research which goes beyond what was previously achieved. c) developed an advanced engineering industry which has broken new ground in materials science, not only in superconductivity and cooling, but in practically all engineering disciplines. d) developed a new level of sophistication in computer analysis and processing ability. Many universities and advanced research facilities around the world contribute to a project as large as LHC, so the benefits are spread worldwide. However the location of LHC makes a huge impact on the scientific abilities and human resources of Europe. As for how much benefit the average European derives from LHC, the question is really how much they benefit from the advancement of general scientific ability and human resources. Besides the innumerable everyday fruits of the advancement of science which average people enjoy today as compared with, say, 1803, there is the even more important fact that their future ability to establish a high quality of life, and to solve major problems, depends on their having an incredible skill and wisdom in dealing with the actual, factual world.
robryan 15y ago
I think it's far to early to start talking about the LHC's value in a past tense.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
icarus_drowning 15y ago
This is, I think, a dishonest question, because we can't know "what they [got] out of it". There is a 5% probability that they might "get something out of it" in the future, and an unknown (likely greater than zero) probability that they will "get" a great deal out of it through readjustments of previously invincible models of how the universe is constructed. Remember, we're trying to figure out why things have mass here, (which, I think, is rather prima facia a very important question to answer) and if we're wrong about how that phenomenon arises, we now have a very big clue to look somewhere else. In short, they got petabytes of data out of it, and frankly, that will most likely prove to be invaluable in and of itself.
- jamesaguilar 15y ago
  > we can't know "what they [got] out of it" Of course not. Only when this is ancient history will we truly know the results of the experiment in a practical sense. But we can hazard guesses, and if we are informed (which I am not) those guesses have some chance of being right. Anyway, your consequent doesn't follow: an inability to know the concrete answer to any given question does not make the question dishonest. > which, I think, is rather prima facia a very important question to answer Important for what purpose? Human happiness? Some concrete goal of technology or economics? The abstract advancement of knowledge? Some mix of all of these things? I agree that it would be nice to know where mass comes from, but that fact absent any useful application (or a probability of a useful application) is of limited value to me. > that will most likely prove to be invaluable in and of itself It is hard for me to believe that the data itself will be something anyone would be willing to pay money for. Do you mean invaluable in some other sense?
  - icarus_drowning 15y ago
    I agree that it would be nice to know where mass comes from, but that fact absent any useful application (or a probability of a useful application) is of limited value to me. I guess if you don't see potential applications of understanding where mass comes from, we're at a bit of an impasse here. It is difficult (if not impossible) to make predictions about what the discovery will bring, but the mere possibility that this research could or might lead to the ability to manipulate mass seems rather valuable to me, in many concrete ways. [UPDATE: I guess if you want to see this as a gamble, you need to take into account the very good track record of abstract scientific discovery leading to enormous benefits. Given that understanding electricity, magnetism, relativity, and countless other scientific discoveries have brought incalculable value to the human race, I guess I don't understand why one wouldn't believe that science was worth the gamble.]
rorrr 15y ago
What they got out of it is that the standard model and supersymmetry are (likely) wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Higgs_boson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Higgs_boson EDIT: actually it looks like they only searched a partial range of energies, there's still a chance to find it.
patrickyeon 15y ago
There are a number of replies telling you that a better understanding of physics is what we get out of this. I completely agree, but that argument won't convince everybody. I don't have numbers at hand, but a large amount of the data the detectors spew out is un-necessary, and needs to be sorted quickly (think real-time or very nearly), so that the back end computing resources can actually keep up with storing it. There is a huge grid infrastructure (data transfer and compute resources) dedicated to the LHC. The problems the scientists and engineers had to solve to get the LHC running will come up in some shape down the road, and we'll benefit from this. We can list off a whole lot of advances that were made for pure science that are ridiculously useful for us today (spectroscopy, lasers, atomic clocks, nuclear reactors, even particle accelerators, off the top of my head). We may also wish to keep in mind that solving the infrastructure problems scientists face also gives society great payoffs.
- jamesaguilar 15y ago
  I thank you for your point about advances made from pure scientific research before. However, I think in many of these cases some applications of the pure research were hypothesized as well, long before the pure research was actually completed. I worry that we are simply picking examples of blue sky research that ended up being practical, and ignoring examples that were not because they are less available. (Which makes sense, since research that had no practical use would probably not come to mind when you try to think of examples where research ended up having a practical use.) Of course, even such a conclusion would not suggest that we should cease all blue sky research. Obviously that would be very silly. But it might make sense to think about whether it is possible to guess ahead of time what research is likely to have practical benefits and what research is not. This way we can spend more money on research likely to have benefits and less on research that is probably useless except for the knowledge's own sake.
  - mturmon 15y ago
    I'm baffled by your last paragraph ("it might make sense to think about whether it is possible to guess ahead of time what research is likely to have practical benefits and what research is not"). You seem to think that a $10B collider was built just because it was possible, not as part of a deliberative/strategic process, partly influenced by a European/American contest for intellectual leadership in this area? Surely you know that the worldwide particle physics community has been contemplating the value of this research for about 20 years? (Since the SSC planning stages.) And that European political bodies have deliberated it at length? I'm not in that community, but my friends who are, are spending a lot of time in Geneva the last couple of years! The value of bringing all that talent in to contribute ideas, and some of them to stay for years, is hard to estimate, but it must be huge. I'm sure Europe is a great place for physics PhDs and postdocs these days.
msie 15y ago
Don't forget the thousands of jobs created and billions injected into the economy. It's not like the money was dumped into a volcano.
- orangecat 15y ago
  If work doesn't produce anything of value (which isn't the case here, just hypothetically), then the "created" jobs are bad for the economy because they divert resources from productive areas. It's another form of the broken window fallacy.
- iwwr 15y ago
  Job creation is just about the worst 'benefit' that can be ascribed to a project. Practically any expenditure can be tied to it. Using this argument just puts your project on par with digging ditches and filling them back again. This is not something a LHC promoter should be proud of, in and of itself.
nitrogen 15y ago
In response to this and your subsequent posts: First, let's draw an analogy to the territorial expansion of the human race. Engineering is like building cities, while basic research is like exploration and mapping. Before Columbus set sail there was an inkling that he might be able to find something of value, but nobody knew whether it would be gold, spices, etc., and certainly nobody foresaw the creation of an eventual world superpower. Plus, city builders need explorers to identify suitable sites for new cities, and to make sure that an expanding city isn't about to run itself off a cliff (or into some other unforeseen territorial hazard). Second, imagine that engineering is like exploring a pitch black cave. Basic research is a flashlight we can shine in various directions. Engineers can make incremental steps forward, but without science lighting the way, we won't know whether we're about to run into a wall. Third, grandiose projects like the LHC or ISS serve as an inspiration to scientists and engineers in all fields. Even if the primary activity of a giant project yields no useful results ("Not finding the Higgs" in the case of the LHC, and "Being in space" in the case of ISS), the supporting research and engineering teams will develop useful technologies to solve related problems (like the grid computing systems others have mentioned). To sum up, basic research like that done at the LHC is necessary to expand the possible solution space for further scientific research and engineering. The further we push the limits of human understanding, the more branching-off points we create for the minds of applied scientists and engineers. The more different things we have to think about, the more likely we are to think useful thoughts that haven't been thought before. We need the LHC et. al. to be at the forefront of knowledge to provide plenty of well-traversed, fertile ground for applied science and engineering.
arethuza 15y ago
"What did they get out of it?" As you read this you are using one of the direct benefits of Europe's funding for CERN two decades ago.

craigmccaskill 15y ago

Indeed. Bean-counters are looking at things totally upside down. A few billion to further the human understanding of the world around us vs the 1.4 trillion spent on the war effort. I know which I'd rather have backed.

tzs 15y ago

> Europe explored the universe where America did not I guess you never heard of a little project called the International Space Station? The SSC was supposed to be a $4 billion project. That's what Congress was told in 1987. By 1993, it was projected as a $12 billion project. Guess where that $8 billion would have come from if the SSC project had continued? From other science projects--and most likely the ISS would have been the first on the chopping block. America continued exploring the universe just fine--but with a broad approach instead of putting everything toward exploring one narrow area. We're seeing a repeat of this with the new space telescope, although the outcome may be different this time. The projected costs have grown massively, and the projected launch date has been pushed WAY out. It's been defunded this year, with Congress specifically calling it out by name as to receive no funding. The Congressman who put that language in has said that this is meant to be a warning to the project's managers that they need to get their act together, and then funding can come back.

ugh 15y ago
You could call it division of labor. The US will obviously benefit from any discoveries the LHC makes, Europe will also benefit from the ISS.
- idlewords 15y ago
  It's comforting to hear you say that someone will benefit from the ISS, since so far it's been a dead loss.
  - ugh 15y ago
    Well, I’m not all that convinced of the usefulness of the ISS myself, I was trying to make a more abstract point. If there are significant scientific discoveries to be made on the ISS, the Europeans will also benefit from them.
    - Eyght 15y ago
      If you look into commercial space research, you'll find that a lot of it (maybe most) is done under non-disclosure. We usually don't get to hear about it until there is a successful product to show.

borism 15y ago

Funny, cause if the Spanish crown didn't fund Columbuses search for alternative route to East-Indies, we wouldn't be talking about American science right now.

wlievens 15y ago
Really? So that huge continent on the other side of the Atlantic would have remained undiscovered for five hundred more years?
- xdissent 15y ago
  Yes. It would only be discoverable from space.