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Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology that benefits society? Well, it's the same principle for esoteric experimental science: unique require
by SiempreViernes 5y ago
Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology that benefits society? Well, it's the same principle for esoteric experimental science: unique requirements leads to new tech being developed and then you can turn around, and if you find some use for some bit of the new tech you can tout it as a "boon to society".
- robonerd 5y agoCouldn't the same be said for particle physics? The accelerators and detectors seem very high tech.
- nobodyandproud 5y agoNo, not if take her at face value. She’s saying particle physics has built a framework where the goalpost can keep moving. It’s become a bottomless trap of sorts. Given that resources—money and bright minds—aren’t infinite, she then proposes that there are other areas of research that received less attention and are ripe for discovery.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThe LHC computing infrastructure is also quite impressive.
- jfengel 5y agoAnd CERN is literally the reason we're here on th Web right now.
- moonchrome 5y agoThat's a huge stretch. CERN might be a reason we have the web that looks like it looks today, but we would have something similar with or without CERN.
- davrosthedalek 5y agoWe might be stuck with compuserve and AOL.
- vidarh 5y agoWe had the internet before the web, and we had gopher. So we had an open network, the client server model and links. What the web brought was a more flexible protocol and document format. That was important, but there's no way we'd have been stuck with compuserve or AOL.
- SiempreViernes 5y agoDo you remember the time when messenger services were open to third party clients? You could actually talk to all your friends using only one app! Those days have ended.
- efitz 5y agoDo you remember the AIM/MSN wars, where AOL was literally building buffer overflows into their protocols to prevent MSN messenger from interoperating? There never was a golden age of interoperability on the internet, at least not after HTTP. Maybe there was a lot of cooperation when it was purely academic in the late 70s and 80s. BBS operators often were cooperative. But commercial internet has always and forever been cutthroat.
- vidarh 5y agoI could not talk to all my friends on only one app, as the vast majority of people were not online. If anything, a far larger number of people are still on open services today than were back then; there are just even more people on locked down services. But why you brought this up in a discussion about the invention of the web, I have no idea.
- webmaven 4y agoDo you remember Microsoft's Blackbird: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)
- efitz 5y agoWe had gopher and SGML before and independently of CERN. The internet was just starting to take off; dial-up modem BBS emigres were getting shell accounts at early ISPs around that time (I know; I had such an account and worked at such an ISP). Just because TBL happened to work at CERN and have a need for hypermedia, doesn't mean that we wouldn't have the WWW in approximately the same shape in approximately the same time frame without CERN or TBL.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoIn an alternative timeline we could have had [1] http://www.art.net/studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html http://www.art.net/studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/hyperlook/ind... [2] https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-goodnews-99f411e58ce4 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go... (with screen shots) [3] https://libarynth.org/hyperlook https://libarynth.org/hyperlook (larger screenshots) based on [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS running atop of whatever, maybe even [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project & [6] http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html instead of the bloat we have now.
- Barrin92 5y agothere's a lot of learning potential in building one or two but after that you're pretty much just making them bigger. There's a lot of engineering and construction involved but the new ones are really just very expensive and huge without netting necessarily much in terms of engineering science. In particular if you consider opportunity costs. With the 23 billion(!) it costs to build the new Large Hadron collider you could fund 230.000 100k grants to young scientists. That's enough money to fund entire disciplines. And that's important to keep in mind because money is a limited resource and what's relevant is where that money didn't go rather than just speaking idealistically about the potential benefits of a megaproject.
- welterde 5y agoThe technology used in the accelerator and the detectors keeps changing though. Particle accelerators today are quite different to those in the 60ies. Also not sure where you got the 23 billions from. Total budget for LHC is less than 8 billion euros. And that's over quite a long time frame. The whole CERN budget is only 1.1 billion a year (and they run quite a few different experiments apart from the LHC). That's within a factor of a few of a major sports club!
- Barrin92 5y agoI'm talking about the new collider (FCC), the LHC is already finished so there's not much point talking about its costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Circular_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Circular_Collider
- spekcular 5y ago"There's a lot of engineering and construction involved but the new ones are really just very expensive and huge without netting necessarily much in terms of engineering science." This is extremely false. The new engineering science required to make the incredibly strong magnets for each collider (newer colliders requiring stronger magnets) is one obvious counterexample.
- SiempreViernes 5y ago
- tshaddox 5y ago> Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology that benefits society? I’ve heard that, yes, as well as NASA inventing velcro and zippers and teflon, and all of it has a faint tinge of “not actually true at all” to it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dwaltrip 5y agoYou don’t see how NASA has pushed technology and science forward? The inspiration it provides for people becoming engineers and scientists is alone probably worth a non-trivial fraction of the US GDP.
- SiempreViernes 5y agoThat's not what they said, I doubt tshaddox questions the contributions to space flight that NASA has produced. What they do seem to question what immediate, house hold, benefit you get from putting people on the moon. Common examples such as vecro and teflon turn out to be wild hyperbole based on at most "NASA made their own version of existing technology". This is a fair remark and something I actually had in mind when I made the comment originally: science doesn't provide very much direct and immediate benefit, all the concrete examples are actually sort of boring things of the "this existing thing is now better (for a surprising reason)" type. But there are also lots of indirect benefits as you say, from the inspiration and philosophical satisfaction (tricky thing to put a monetary value on) to just the plain old developing of technical skill that transfers to other specialised areas of society.
- TomSwirly 5y ago> Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology that benefits society? No, not since World War 2. Examples?
- davrosthedalek 5y agoARPANET and GPS come to mind. Both were developed with large military impetus.
- hollerith 5y agoThe jet engine would be another example.
- davrosthedalek 5y agoTechnically that was something invented before/in WW-II.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]