College: Should taxpayers continue to foot the bill?

Chuck Stone wrote: »

The large hadron collider (LHC).

Talk about a tax-payer cluster fcuk. €7,600,000,000 (7.6bn) and for what? So some physicists can pretend they are working?

Now there's little doubt these people are good at school and college but why the fuck should Joe Soap fund their stupid little games? If people were asked to fund the LHC would they?

Fuck no.

Finding out how the Universe works has never been a bad idea. In fact, it is the quest for a deeper understanding of nature that has given us everything we now take for granted in modern life. In an eloquent speech to the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1966, the theoretical physicist and then Phillips research director, H.G.B. Casimir, pointed out that virtually all of the great discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries came from curiosity-driven research. The transistor emerged from the quantum theory of solids, not from a desire to build computers and televisions. Radio waves were not discovered by men in government-directed laboratories in order to connect the world together with better communication systems, but by Heinrich Hertz, a man whose overriding concern was for the beauty of physics. In his speech, Casimir went on to list many of the great innovations of the mid-20th century — from nuclear power to automobile starter motors — and point out that none of them came about as a result of some kind of pragmatic process of innovation. The light bulb, as the saying goes, was not invented through research and development on the candle.

It should not be surprising that a deeper understanding of nature leads to great benefits for humankind. History speaks for itself. So why, then, could anyone question the “benefit” of projects like the LHC? I believe society undervalues exploration because searching for incremental solutions to pressing problems feels like a more pragmatic response to our problems than the quest for a revolution. It feels like we know enough — and we should focus our energies on better exploiting what we know. But, what is “enough”? If we ha applied this logic to particle physics over the past few decades, then we would have no World Wide Web (invented at CERN in 1990), no medical imaging scanners (the P in PET scanning stands for positron, an antimatter electron discovered in 1932 by observing cosmic rays) and no x-ray or chemotherapy treatments, all of which rely on miniature particle accelerators to create the short-lived radioisotopes required for medical use. The world would be a far less comfortable place because of the loss of medicine alone, and a poorer place for the loss to commerce.

Most importantly, though, the world would be truly impoverished without all the fundamental knowledge we’ve gained. And the LHC has been built to answer some very profound questions about the nature of matter. We know it will discover something because we have deliberately built it to journey to uncharted waters, reaching energies in its particle collisions never before achieved in Earthly laboratories (although routinely achieved by nature elsewhere in the universe — prophets of doom take note, we are not powerful enough to endanger the world with this thing by a very long shot!)

What might the LHC discover? Top of the list is the origin of mass in the universe. We strongly suspect that the particles that make up our bodies don’t just have mass — that is to say substance — but acquire it by some very subtle mechanism. The most well-established theory is the Higgs mechanism, which predicts the existence of one or more particles known as Higgs bosons that should be well within the reach of the LHC. We also hope to discover the nature of dark matter, which many theorists suspect consists of a new kind of subatomic particle that outnumbers the stuff that makes up the Earth, Sun and all the stars in the sky by a ratio of 5:1. More speculatively, we could discover extra dimensions in the universe, revealing in a Copernican revolution of unprecedented proportion, that we’re crawling around on a four-dimensional sheet in a perhaps infinitely larger multi-dimensional cosmos like ants on a piece of paper. And last, but hardly least, we could discover something so strange and, possibly, so useful that nobody has yet thought of it.