Large Hadron Collider

The collider sitting there by itself, won't cure diseases or feed people.

What we can learn from the collider's use, knowledge that can be gainfully applied some years from now, is not possible to predict.

I'm glad that we collectively ignored the people who grumbled about the very first family of synchrotrons being 'money better spent upon whatever.' Because without those machines - no scanning or tunneling electron microscopes, no nuclear medicine, none of the many life-saving and life-improving benefits available as a result, today.

And the same is true for every technological advance made since about 1700. Like Michael Faraday answered, when asked what use is your electricity?: "What use is a newborn baby?"

This no-use-for-basic-knowledge-show-me-an-application-right-now-or-it's-worthless thinking, is unworthy of anyone living in a technological society. Hell, it's not even suitable for a society with ambitions toward developing agriculture.
 
Knowledge is important, thats undisputeable, however its a simple case of priorites, thats all. Thinking is important indeed, but if you can't breath first its not much use.
 
Advancing the entire species through increased basic knowledge is a higher priority than the kind of band-aid-on-a-sucking-chest-wound expenditures that are frequently nominated as more pressing concerns (many of which receive, and frequently waste vast quantities of money, already, at no discernable benefit to the people most obviously in need of help).
 
Sad Max said:
Advancing the entire species through increased basic knowledge is a higher priority than the kind of band-aid-on-a-sucking-chest-wound expenditures that are frequently nominated as more pressing concerns (many of which receive, and frequently waste vast quantities of money, already, at no discernable benefit to the people most obviously in need of help).
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First of all, its easy to list a few scientific success stories in order to prove a point, but don't forget to mention the millions of scientific experiments which failed miserably. Many of which received, and frequently wasted vast quantities of money, at no discernable benefit to the people. Sound familiar? lol

As far as "Advancing the entire species through increased basic knowledge", that's exactly my point. Why don't we start with providing quality education to all students? Most of whom, right now, can't even tell you what an atom is made of. And that's what I meant by getting our priorities straight. Problems are stacking up and we're losing control. We need to take a break for a few years and focus all our brain power and money in a few places and "see" what can be done. Now THAT would be a viable scientific experiment and any one who says its not would be the same as those who grumbled about the synchrotrons.

Give me the same amount of money spent on the collider and I'll show you some advancing of the entire species. And it won't involve smashing atoms together (I'll leave that to the nerds). It will involve educating all the poor in the world and seeing what amazing inventions they can come up with in the future. Who knows, the next Einstein or Edison might be some teenager in Somalia.
 
PK Gillock said:
First of all, its easy to list a few scientific success stories in order to prove a point, but don't forget to mention the millions of scientific experiments which failed miserably. Many of which received, and frequently wasted vast quantities of money, at no discernable benefit to the people. Sound familiar? lol
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I'm sure that you can list some number of these hugely expensive individual projects which wasted all those resources, without yielding any useful data or knowledge, at all. Remember that even a failed experiment, can yield useful information based upon its mode of failure.

PK Gillock said:
As far as "Advancing the entire species through increased basic knowledge", that's exactly my point. Why don't we start with providing quality education to all students? Most of whom, right now, can't even tell you what an atom is made of. And that's what I meant by getting our priorities straight.
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That's not a problem whose basic solution lies in throwing more money at it. And your suggestion is self-defeating: if you make an either-or choice to invest in teaching more people physics versus building vital tools for physicists to use, you wind up with trained physicists who lack the instruments required to support research that advances the field.

PK Gillock said:
Problems are stacking up and we're losing control. We need to take a break for a few years and focus all our brain power and money in a few places and "see" what can be done. Now THAT would be a viable scientific experiment and any one who says its not would be the same as those who grumbled about the synchrotrons.
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You're not describing a 'scientific experiment,' viable or otherwise. You're describing some kind of vague woolly indistinct stab at a policy outline that doesn't actually mean anything.

PK Gillock said:
Give me the same amount of money spent on the collider and I'll show you some advancing of the entire species. And it won't involve smashing atoms together (I'll leave that to the nerds). It will involve educating all the poor in the world and seeing what amazing inventions they can come up with in the future. Who knows, the next Einstein or Edison might be some teenager in Somalia.
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Back to the frankly foolish idea that simply throwing money at problems like - for example - Somalia, is any kind of solution, at all. Somalia's problems - and the critical problems faced by people in a lot of other places - can't be solved by just dumping more and more dollars down a bottomless pit.
 
Sad Max said:
Remember that even a failed experiment, can yield useful information based upon its mode of failure.
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No reason to state the obvious. Which is why I didn't mention it in my original post. But sense you brought it up, I'm sure the useless "expenditures" you mentioned before also had some benefit too. Don't you think?

Sad Max said:
Back to the frankly foolish idea that simply throwing money at problems like - for example - Somalia, is any kind of solution, at all. Somalia's problems - and the critical problems faced by people in a lot of other places - can't be solved by just dumping more and more dollars down a bottomless pit.
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I don't appreciate you calling anything I say as foolish, Sad Max. I kept my response as respectful as possible so I would appreciate the same from you.

With that said, obviously Somalia was an example. Sorry I haven't prepared a PowerPoint presentation, outlining in detail all the ways I would spend the $10 billion. (I was just given the money a few minutes ago. lol) But, trust me, by the time we started spending the money there wouldn't be ANY foolishness involved and NO throwing money down a pit.

Besides, I don't know how anyone could see educating the uneducated as throwing money down a pit? Even in Somalia. Education is everything and the benefits have no ends. This year we provided scholarships to 20 people and it cost less than $2,000. Providing those scholarships is an experiment. We don't know what effect it will have on them or society. Either way I never see those scholarships as foolish and the students don't either. But many grumpy old foreigners in Thailand (there's a lot of them) have told me that giving scholarships here is pointless (i.e. a bottomless pit). I think our experiments will prove them wrong. Because even if just one of the students has a better life then that would have yielded useful information. Sound familiar?

I reiterate, we should focus all our money and energy into educating the people and THAT will lead to the most amazing renaissance of humanity we've ever seen. I'm sure the scientific tools will be fine and even if they are a few years out-dated, as someone who works in film, you should know that an idea can not be stopped by out-dated tools. Limits promote creativity and I'm sure that most major inventions since 1700 prove that.


Edit: Is anyone else having problems connecting to DVXuser? I think the collider is screwing things up. :)
 
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PK Gillock said:
In other words, unless the collider is going to cure cancer or feed the hungry...
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PK, you should be aware that it might just do one of these. Or at least either help a lot, or provide some really good new tools for Doctors to work with.

Anti-matter used in cancer treatment.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6403737.stm

Just today Frank Wilczek was on NPR and mentioned this.

This is a direct, real-world benefit from another collider.

M
 
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I'd like to add that it's somewhat false to say the money spent on the LHC was thrown into a pit. The building of the LHC employed many, many people over the years it was built and will employ many more in the years to come. The knowledge gained from the LHC could very well change the world. There are many things scientists still don't understand about the universe -- like how gravity actually works the way it does and why it's the weakest of the four fundamental forces -- and figuring them out could lead to many other discoveries. I appreciate PK's sentiment and obviously we need to do alot more to educate and care for those less fortunate in this world, but there are better targets in this world that demonstrate wasteful spending, which I won't go into for fear of turning this into a political argument.
 
PK Gillock said:
No reason to state the obvious. Which is why I didn't mention it in my original post.
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If it's obvious to you that even research that fails to deliver the expected results can be valuable, productive, and therefore worthwhile, why did you decide to introduce the argument that there are "millions of scientific experiments which failed miserably. Many of which received, and frequently wasted vast quantities of money, at no discernable benefit to the people?" And, where are those examples of this hugely expensive wasteful research, from which we learned absolutely nothing? Out of "millions," you ought to be able to produce at least two or three instances, to support your point...

PK Gillock said:
But sense you brought it up, I'm sure the useless "expenditures" you mentioned before also had some benefit too. Don't you think?
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Not in reasonable proportion to the resources expended, no.

PK Gillock said:
I don't appreciate you calling anything I say as foolish, Sad Max. I kept my response as respectful as possible so I would appreciate the same from you.
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My respect for you, and for your work - which is substantial - is not diminished by specific things you choose to argue, which impress me as foolish. But there is no one for whom I have sufficient respect, to let a foolish statement slide by without pointing it out.

PK Gillock said:
With that said, obviously Somalia was an example.
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Somalia is a shining example of a place where simply throwing money at the people's problems will accomplish nothing worthwhile. I don't know why you chose it, as a place where just flooding the landscape with dollars will help; you could hardly have chosen a worse candidate for that sort of aid to be successful.

PK Gillock said:
Sorry I haven't prepared a PowerPoint presentation, outlining in detail all the ways I would spend the $10 billion. (I was just given the money a few minutes ago. lol)
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...and you're not using it to finance a movie...?

PK Gillock said:
But, trust me, by the time we started spending the money there wouldn't be ANY foolishness involved and NO throwing money down a pit.
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An accomplishment that professional international aid organizations with billion-dollar endowments and staffs of thousands of highly-trained individuals, can't pull off. I figure you're joking, here.

PK Gillock said:
Besides, I don't know how anyone could see educating the uneducated as throwing money down a pit? Even in Somalia.
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A country lacking roads, sanitation, adequate food supply, clean water, disease-vector control, functional government, a working health-care system and - most important - a day-to-day operating civil society, is not in a position to meaningfully take advantage of even basic education. Hungry, sick, fearful, dirty people need food, medical care, a stable society and resources with which to clean themselves up, even more urgently than basic math and reading. While I agree that education is the cornerstone of a progressive society, you can't lay a cornerstone without first preparing your site.

PK Gillock said:
Education is everything and the benefits have no ends.
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See above. A math text is of little value to someone who's starving, blackboards are poor cover against rifle fire, and chronic dysentery will most assuredly keep you from even reaching a classroom, in the first place. 'Education is everything' is no more intelligent a slogan than 'sewer pipes are everything' or 'paved roads are everything.' Conditions under which education is practical and - even more important - applicable are the place to start looking, for 'everything' that's needed.

PK Gillock said:
This year we provided scholarships to 20 people and it cost less than $2,000. Providing those scholarships is an experiment. We don't know what effect it will have on them or society. Either way I never see those scholarships as foolish and the students don't either.
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You're not talking about chucking resources into a lawless, backward war zone without government or infrastructure, here. Which has a critical impact upon the degree to which it would, or wouldn't be foolish.

PK Gillock said:
But many grumpy old foreigners in Thailand (there's a lot of them) have told me that giving scholarships here is pointless (i.e. a bottomless pit). I think our experiments will prove them wrong. Because even if just one of the students has a better life then that would have yielded useful information. Sound familiar?
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If you get the results you're after, you will have obtained experimental evidence that people in the area where you are granting scholarships, benefit from the education made possible by the scholarships.

Are you seriously comparing the implications, and potential applications of your experiment, to research designed to revise fundamental understandings of matter and energy?

PK Gillock said:
I reiterate, we should focus all our money and energy into educating the people and THAT will lead to the most amazing renaissance of humanity we've ever seen.
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Good luck educating hungry, sick, poverty-stricken people while dodging bullets on the one hand, and ingrained cultural regressiveness, on the other. Since 'all' of that money on education, leaves nothing for establishing to conditions under which people can actually benefit, from one.

PK Gillock said:
I'm sure the scientific tools will be fine and even if they are a few years out-dated, as someone who works in film, you should know that an idea can not be stopped by out-dated tools. Limits promote creativity and I'm sure that most major inventions since 1700 prove that.
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If you are conducting research into what happens beyond a specified energy threshold, you absolutely must have equipment capable of operating past that threshold. You may as well suggest that astronomers should be content with Galileo's first telescope, and that if they want to study distant galaxies in radio frequencies...well, they can just not let themselves be stopped, by out-dated tools.


PK Gillock said:
Edit: Is anyone else having problems connecting to DVXuser? I think the collider is screwing things up. :)
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Yeah, the site ate my initial response to you, so I rewrote it. This time, I'll save the text, before hitting 'submit...'
 
This contraption has been around for years. I think the reason it's in the forefront of the news is beacuse they have a new media director and are looking to get more investment into the project.

What better way to learn than from the Nasa guys.
Funding is what it's all about. Life on mars? ooookay, gotta send a ship out there and find out, that's another 20 yr US funded gig.

Now all of a sudden the big collider is going to save the world from what now? cough.
Marketing folks. Pure and simple.

IMO.

//Oh yeah, dvx was offline for about an hour for me anyways.
 
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Raptor365 said:
Funding is what it's all about.
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No bucks...no Buck Rogers.

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