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The premise of this discussion is that those 1000 experiments would likely to be very scientifically vaaluable.
by pyb 4y ago
The premise of this discussion is that those 1000 experiments would likely to be very scientifically vaaluable.
- Teever 4y agoYes but if the person who is saying that those 1000 experiments won't be funded but the next large hadron collider will and the next LHC is a waste of money then the alternative is between funding a waste of money and funding possibly not a waste of money like maybe some social programs or something.
- ironmagma 4y agoThere is other science we can do besides just physics.
- pessimizer 4y agoThe premise of this subthread is that failing to fund another collider does not mean that those 1000 experiments will be funded. The person you're replying to is saying that even if money not thrown at a collider doesn't end up going to 1000 physics experiments, it will go to something. If that something is net-useful, it will be better than a new collider whose usefulness is questionable.
- Beldin 4y agoPhysics is (or should be) regarded enviably by other disciplines. They keep managing to get these crazily expensive multinational projects funded: LHC, ITER, various space telescopes... multi-billion projects. I honestly cannot recall an official scientific experiment or tool in another discipline funded for even only 100 million. Just imagine that level of funding for your favourite discipline. The direct scientific value may be limited; the spinoff of that much attention / funding isn't. Not saying we should definitely fund a new collider. But the amount of effort needed is so huge, that even just the discussion will have positive impact for science.
- webnrrd2k 4y agoCalifornia funded stem cell research with Proposition 71 at 3 billion, and the follow-up funding for Proposition 14 at an additional 5.5 billion. This might not count as it's not a single 'official scientific experiment or tool', but I think that biosci is clearly getting heavily funded.
- sanxiyn 4y agoHuman Genome Project was $3B. It is especially salient because in a sense it was in competition with Superconducting Super Collider, which it won. Big Science and Big Politics in the United States: Reflections on the Death of the SSC and the Life of the Human Genome Project (1997) is a classic in history of science analyzing this competition.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoAnd there’s simply no argument that the Human Genome Project benefited humanity more than a collider. Think what $100 billion towards cancer could do.
- freemint 4y agoMaybe not that much. They could 100x the sample size of all their experiments giving one decimal point more. They could research some more obscure cancers. Research into virology seems a bigger thing to research. There is way more "parallelism" there meaning funding could be allocated more efficiently nin some given time frame.
- edgyquant 4y agoComputer Science? Biology (there are tons of multinational research labs.) I also wouldn’t consider telescopes physics. That’s astronomy.