We could build a sufficiently powerful collider, but it would have to be made out the bodies of poor people after feeding them through a wood-chipper, and those cowards in Washington just won’t commit.
:: takes a sit in back, slumps down in chair::
Don’t mind me. I’m just waiting for it to stop raining. Please go on with your discussion.
::pulls hat over eyes and pretends to sleep while surreptitiously turning on tape recorder::
Eeeexcellent . . . Heh-heh . . .
Seriously, this is, of course, merely a tool for responsible scientific research, and there’s not the slightest chance it will open a rift in reality for ou-- for an extradimensional invasion force. Seriously.
Holy crap! My Jedi mind trick actaully worked for once!!
:: runs off the find natalie portman ::
Why? Got a hadron for her?
And yet you are forcefully expressing an opinion on the validity and worth of a high-energy physics experiment. Huh.
Then you don’t understand how scientific investigation works. Full stop.
Don’t feel bad, though. It’s a depressingly common misconception.
You, and your children, and your children’s children, and your children’s children’s children’s children, will pay for that pun.
But not your children’s children’s children. I find that, in doling out vengeance, it’s best to skip a generation so as to lull the victims into complaceny.
There’s no chance it will destroy the world. None whatsoever. Claims to the contrary are mostly the result of irresponsible journalism, or poor communication by scientists, or perhaps even deliberately alarmist statements by scientists on the theory that “any press is good press”. Not to mention people playing so fast and loose with the meaning of the word “possible” that it doesn’t really mean anything any more.
The short answer to why it’s not dangerous is this: Cosmic rays hit the earth all the time with much higher energies than the collisions which will happen at the LHC. The only difference at the LHC is that it will happen under controlled laboratory conditions, so scientists can actually see what is produced. If it were going to destroy the world then we’d all already be dead by now, many many times over.
You might not believe that learning new things about science is worth spending a lot of money on, but lots of people do. Is it really worth more than feeding the poor? Eh, probably not, but neither is the Iraq war or 90% of the other wars that have ever been fought. Sadly, governments aren’t typically willing to cough up such large sums of money to do things like help poor people. If there were no LHC, we’d be that much further from understanding some mysteries of physics, and the poor would still be just as poorly off.
As for potential benefits, there’s really no way to know for certain. Do you think that when people were developing quantum mechanics in the early 20th century to understand things like the spectrum of hydrogen that they knew it would someday enable us to have laptops and dvd players?
It’s also worth noting that the World Wide Web was invented at CERN (the particle physics research facility that now houses the LHC). So at the very least, high energy physics research has revolutionized the porn industry. 
I keep seeing this dubious claim that particle accelerators haven’t contributed anything useful, but I’ll tell you my mother has to have regular PET scans (to track a brain tumor) which seems pretty useful to me.
PET’s rely on radioisotopes manufactured by a cyclotron, which I’d have to imagine is a pretty direct application of the technology. Maybe this isn’t useful enough? I’m not sure how high the bar is here.
BTW, check out Einstein’s Bridge, by John Cramer.
If I were in charge of the project, I would schedule the first experiment to be the last day of the Mayan calendar just to get everyone freaked out.
Anybody arguing here is wasting their time Argent Towers has started several other threads on the topic and nothing was swayed him from his belief that the LHC can destroy the universe or some such thing. I think pointing out the importance of research, actual practical applications, or showing that the cost really isn’t all that large will have the same effect, none.
Can’t scientists spend more time solving problems like world hunger?
There is no solution to world hunger. There is more than enough food to go around. Vast swathes of the world don’t have the infrastructure to handle it, or the will to fix that problem.
See also: Sub Saharan Africa.
“World hunger” isn’t a problem with a scientific solution. Sure scientists can come up with hardier crops with higher yields, but if the world’s populatin continues to increase then eventually someone will go hungry.
Solving world hunger requires social solutions, not scientific ones: birth control programs, better education for girls and young women, etc. Scientists have already done a lot on the “more food” front. What we need now is progress on the “fewer mouths” front.
Do you think quantum mechanics makes sense? And yet it has been verified. Semiconductor physics, which relies on quantum theory more and more, is pretty odd too, but it is the basis for the processor running the computer you are typing on.
A lot of this stuff is hard to explain in words, but makes a lot more sense if you have the math. I don’t have the math for this stuff, but I do for other things, so I can appreciate it.
You need both basic and applied research. You talk about health. Where would we be if Watson and Crick weren’t working on the purely theoretical problem of the structure of the DNA molecule? You want support for the environment. What if the results from experiments at the LHC lead to cheap and clean fusion power? The point of basic research is that lots of it comes to nothing, but when it gets an important result, it enables the applied research you love so much. Without it, the applied research eventually runs out of steam and you are left working on incremental improvements. In my field, I went to workshops where a topic was reported on by some university people, which was interesting but seemed to have no useful application. Then, suddenly, someone building on this came up with a real tool using it. That impractical research turned out to be the basis of tens of millions of dollars of product - pretty big in my neck of the woods.
Any world which can afford Iraq and our military budgets can afford basic scientific research.
Physicists can’t.
I read cosmology for fun, and usually find it pretty clear, but this book is one of the most difficult I’ve read. I need to find time to read it again. I don’t visualize very well, which might be some of the problem. I also think explaining an immature area is harder than explaining a mature one.
It’s not science’s problem to solve. It’s capitalism’s problem. Until there’s a profit motive in giving food to the poor, there will be hungry people.
For someone who throws around the word “bullshit” like a foosball, the o.p. certainly seems oblivious to his own peculiarly scented excrement. In between vacillating between barely literate contempt for and avowed ignorance of “String Theory” (which is related to the Higgs boson in the same way that John Lennon was related to Kipling’s Sea Vitch) he champions the tinfoil-hatism of apocalyptic doom hypothesized by people incapable of comprehending basic particle physics, and then campaigning that the money “wasted” on abstract physical science instead be applied to avenues of applied research which are hardly bereft of plenteous funding. Whether the money spent on the construction and operation of the Large Hadron Collider is a good value of science dollars is a topic worthy of intelligent and informed debate, unfortunately not to be found in this thread. Instead, the o.p. tosses out non sequiturs, ad hominin, and argumentative fallacy like a parade clown throwing candy.
As for the value of the pursuit of abstract knowledge, no one can really predict what will eventually come of any given nugget of information. However, experimental discovery of the Higgs boson will not only refine some models of particle physics (and dismiss others); it will also improve insight into how the physical world works on a fundamental level (or at least, a more fundamental level than we do now) which will have significant impact upon future technology. One might as well have asked James Clerk Maxwell what use there was in his theory and experiments of electromagnetism and expect him to respond with prognostication of color television, computed axial tomography, and the iPod. Arguing against abstract knowledge in toto on the basis that it doesn’t make your porridge taste better today isn’t mere Ludditism; it’s a complete avowal of the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of better understanding the world and to the benefit of future generations. There are any of a vast number of ways in which money that could be used to benefit the needy is frivolously squandered; on entertainment, fashion, recreational travel, sports, cars, et cetera ad nauseam. The Large Hadron Collider isn’t taking bread out of anyone’s mouth, and it isn’t being powered by the extracted spleens of Indonesian children. Any argument predicated on the basis is absurd in its essentials; abstract knowledge at large has been of much greater value to mankind than any amount of present money.
Perhaps, when you are done raving from blithe ignorance about your choice outrage du jour, you could organize some kind of petition to feed the poor or contribute money to AIDS research. You know, since you are all heated up about those causes. Or are those just a convenient screen to conceal an innate contempt for things that you don’t understand?
With regard to social and political problems like war, poverty, famine, et cetera, science has provided plenty of solutions, some of which, of course, end up contributing to the problem rather than dissolving it. Science and knowledge are tools, not solutions in and of themselves. When wielded artlessly or with malice–say, the Green Revolution or nuclear weapons–they create more problems. We could resolve the problem of world hunger, fresh water, and basic medical care today–with existing technology, and at far less than nations spend vying with one another over territorial boundaries or black goo–if the political will and universal cooperation permitted it. This isn’t a problem that science and technology can or will solve. Blaming scientists of “wasting money” in pursuit of basic knowledge is like blaming your car mechanic because you got a speeding ticket.
Stranger