As if “test and determine mass bound of the Higgs boson” isn’t goal oriented.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinquishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke
Or something like that.
String theory is not a technology, it’s a theory. A convoluted theory that doesn’t make any sense, and is to my eyes made up chiefly of made-up stand-in words that define theoretical, unproven and nonexistent concepts. Like I said, what the hell is a “string” in the first place? How does it “vibrate?” How will a “boson” answer either of those questions?
I am NOT one of those people who says “science is a religion!” or any of that bullshit. I’m not interested in religion or religious debates and I come down firmly on the side of science versus any kind of religion. But with that said, String Theory really sounds like more of a religion than a science. Not a religion in the sense of worshipping a specific deity, but in the sense of “we have these unproven, bizarre ideas about how the universe is organized.” Even the Wikipedia entry on String Theory says that many do not consider it to be a science.
Well kudos to you then. You’ll be happy to know that the LHC isn’t testing string theory, it’s testing the Standard Model.
As was any scientific concept before it was proven. So was electricity. So was evolution. So was atomic power.
I don’t want to discredit your objections. Yes, it is an expensive, complicated project and we don’t know what results we’re going to find. And the money spend could go towards buying everyone in the world an iPod. That’s the scientific process. But it more and more sounds like you’re trying to discredit it on the basis of it being "bad science"and it’s just not.
What’s string theory got to do with any of this? Even without string theory, high energy particle colliders are necessary for basic research in particle physics. Your lack of understanding of string theory is a strawman.
Besides, there’s more than a hint of circular reasoning to criticize a theory for having no supporting evidence, and then criticizing any attempt to find evidence for that theory as wasting money on an unproven hypothesis!
No. And war can actually produce benefits, like the freeing of Jews from concentration camps.
Your sentence is ambiguous 
Are you implying big science has no benefit, or only that the assumption that war is without benefit is incorrect?
Who me? A comment on the hadron collider — what with it being only one example of Big Science — is not a comment on Big Science as a whole, just as a comment about a cow would not necessarily be a comment about every bovine.
Yeah, but Argent Tower’s objection to the LHC is pretty generic, IMO. It’s unlikely that he’d complain about the LHC and then be fine with any of the other colliders in existence.
Anyway, I misread what you were saying.
Help the poor? We’ve spent trillions (well, at least billions) on helping the poor. The poor issue has been solved. There are no more poor. Certainly not after spending trillions.
Yes, we know.
Helping the poor.
I know there are other colliders in existence. There’s actually a “cyclotron” here in Bloomington. But has anything directly beneficial to the development of practical technology come out of these colliders?
I’m definitely a fan of science, but like everything in life, I think it ought to be practiced in moderation and with common sense. I think that science funding should be focused in such a way that it provides maximum capital for the projects most likely to yield concrete results that can help civilization and the environment in a direct manner.
Well, what do you expect in a discussion about a particle accelerator? 
The Large Hadron Collider has, since 1995, cost from between 5 and 10 Billion US Dollars. That is a lot of money, no bones about it. However:
In that same amount of time, the EPA Superfund has cost well over 15 Billion dollars, with lots and lots and LOTS of cleanup left to do.
The National Cancer institute seems to have a budget of approx. 5 Billion dollars a year.
The AIDS crisis costs between 8 and 10 Billion dollars annually, globally.
The money for the LHC, if broken up and used with any of these causes, would barely make a spike in their budget graphs.
That being said, you mentioned the space program as having a viable goal or result. When the US space program was started after WWII, it didn’t. We had captured these rocket and scientists from Germany, and they were essentially a war weapon, but even at the height of the space program, when we had men walking on the moon, and satellites providing warnings of hurricanes, there were those that complained that the money could be put to better use.
Science very rarely has a clear and defined benefit initially. It is only afterwards, when the results of experimentation and study are known that we can apply those benefits.
Has anything practical ever come out of particle physics?
1930s --> Neutron, beta decay and Nuclear force linked to mesons
1940s --> Stuff that goes boom
1950s --> QED - charged particles interact via photons
1960s --> Quarks and the “particle zoo”
1970s --> Quarks, Quantum Chromo dynamics
1980s --> Electroweak carriers
1990s --> Neutrino mass and possible Higgs
2000s --> Gosh lets find out
Who could point to any application of QED in modern electronics, neutron scattering in nickel alloys, positron beams for cancer or the ability to build charged particle detectors for rapid detection and assessment of massive numbers of entities let alone the ability to interact at a distance with co-workers and disseminate information?
Now I can see where you’d say particle physics is an esoteric field with little impact on the daily lives of common people. It’s vaguely akin to the more ethereal fields like the application of knife work in slicing soup.
Basically you’re arguing that technological development should be shaped by applicability, which is a fair if limited view point. Basic research is not about applicability, it’s about finding out what you don’t know and testing what you do to make sure you’re not wrong.
Says the man typing this on the World Wide Web… No CERN, no Web.
And I’ve read (paper magazine, can’t recall which, maybe Popular Mechanics?) that some advances in superconductors and magnetic technology have come about specifically as a result of LHC work. Some of which have applications in everyday computers.
To be fair, the Web wasn’t a result of particle colliders as such, but a means by which information could be disseminated easily, by Tim Berners Lee who happened to be working at CERN.
Hey, if the rocketboys get to claim Velcro, rayheads get to claim hypertext.
Plus it wasn’t just that he was working there, ENQUIRE addressed some fairly CERN-centric problems about collaborative research and the like. Sure, it could have been any other large research institution, but it wasn’t.
In the first place the whole string theory component of this discussion is a red herring. Experimentally testing most of string theory is well beyond the capabilities of the LHC. It’s just not powerful enough.
The Higgs boson is a hypothetical particle that produces something called the Higgs field, much in the same way that photons produce electric and magnetic fields.
One of the big open questions of physics is “Why do some particles have mass and others don’t?” Photons are massless and travel at the speed of light. Electrons have mass and travel at less than the speed of light. Why are they different?
The current theory is that all space is filled with a Higgs field that acts on some particles and not others. The Higgs field provides “resistence” to particles that it interacts with – that resistence is what we observe as mass.
One of the major goals of the LHC is to actually observe a Higgs boson and measure its properties. That in turn will give us a greater understanding of how the Higgs field operates. Which will help us understand how mass works.
Maybe in 100 years we’ll be able to manipulate mass the way we can manipulate electricity and magnetism now. Who knows? We can’t even begin to understand the practical applications until we get the basic physics right.
How do you know? A lot of money is spent on cancer research and people still get cancer. You are making a bet that money spent in one area will pay off in benefits to society more than in another area, but there is no certainty here. Consider quantum mechanics. That was a pretty pie-in-the-sky area of research for a long time. But without that research the microelectronics revolution would not have been possible and I am sure you realize how useful cheap computers are to such fields as medical research, ecological research, etc.
FWIW,
Rob