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pezar
Phoenix
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 Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 7:00 pm Post subject: Day of reckoning for the Large Hadron Collider... |
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24556999/
Funny how the latest message from Al Qaeda didn't make the front page of MSNBC, but the phantom "threat" of some unspeakable doomsday from this collider did. My prediction: while people are worried about The Strangelet That Ate Switzerland, a real disaster will happen, and nobody will care, or be totally blindsided. I personally am more worried about Al Qaeda than a science experiment, although I do think that this is a colossal waste of $10 billion. When do we say enough? Even the scientists start to obfuscate when asked what the point of the LHC is. So we detect the Higgs Boson, the world goes on, and nobody can figure out what to do with it except build some medical imager that only Americans can afford to use. Curiosity doesn't justify the price tag. |
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LeKiwi
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 7:07 pm Post subject: |
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al Qaeda is the boogeyman. Seriously. Better things to worry about than a non-existant organisation used to fuel propaganda and keep people in a state of fear.
Anyway, with that out the way...
I've been following the progress of the large hadron collider for the past six months or so - it'll be very interesting to see what happens, but I'm not overly worried about it.
The thing that annoys me most about it is that yes, it is very interesting and all that, but surely that money could have been spent on, oh, I don't know, maybe putting in some wells in third world countries so people have access to clean water, or on education in those same places, or helping the farmers become self-sufficient so famine is no more... you know, stuff that might actually make a difference to the large percentage of the population who struggle to survive?
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DWill
Sea Gull
Joined: Dec 20, 2007
Age: 22
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 7:22 pm Post subject: |
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Personally I think that the knowledge we will gain from that particle accelerator is worth more than all the money on the planet or any new gadget that could come from it. But that's just me.
I find it unbelievable that someone is trying to use legal action to stop it though. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. |
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ShadesOfMe
Bunny Pirate on the seven seas!
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 7:23 pm Post subject: |
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wait. I don't understand this. could someone put this in simple terms for me?
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jrknothead
Impatience rarely succeeds
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Joined: Aug 04, 2007
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 7:35 pm Post subject: |
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Glad to.
For years, theoretical physicists have pondered the reason they can't account for 90% of the mass in the universe... they suppose that the bulk of mass resides in a substance called 'dark matter' which they can't seem to locate.
What the Large Hadron Collider will do is, it will let them fire two streams of protons in opposite directions, which then accellerate to very near the speed of light, and collide on the other side, simulating conditions that occurred at the beginning of the universe..
Huge detectors at the point of collision will tell them if anything escapes that is or is not matter, whether it be the so-called 'Dark matter', or some ordinary matter, or a new kind of particle heretofore undiscovered.
A fellow named Higgs postulated what such a particle might consist of, and this particle has been given the name of "The Higgs Boson" which nobody has ever seen.
So, when they fire up the collider next month (after a month of rigorous testing to make sure everything works alright), the collider either will or will not produce Higgs Bosons... if it does, then they can study the new particle... If it doesn't produce Higgs Bosons or any other new particle, well then they just wasted 10 billion dollars and it's back to the drawing board. |
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LeKiwi
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 7:50 pm Post subject: |
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| ShadesOfMe wrote: | | wait. I don't understand this. could someone put this in simple terms for me? |
In simple terms, they smash really small stuff together really fast and then make new small stuff that's really cool. Hopefully.
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pezar
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 8:25 pm Post subject: |
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| LeKiwi wrote: |
The thing that annoys me most about it is that yes, it is very interesting and all that, but surely that money could have been spent on, oh, I don't know, maybe putting in some wells in third world countries so people have access to clean water, or on education in those same places, or helping the farmers become self-sufficient so famine is no more... you know, stuff that might actually make a difference to the large percentage of the population who struggle to survive? |
Precisely. The scientists sound like a schoolboy who is tearing apart a car radio for the first time. It seems solely to exist to satisfy the curiosity of a handful of overgrown geeks who have never had to, say, scrounge for a handful of morsels of food each day then wonder where one's next handful of moldy flour is coming from tomorrow, like the over 1 billion people who live on less than $1 a day do. It reminds me of such things as the experiments in magnetic resonance imaging in the 1960s. Ultimately, they produced a scanner that allows overgrown medical geeks to peer into the workings of the human brain, but which has very little if any real impact on an Ethiopian farmer worried about drought.
The West's culture seems to produce this weird disconnect, as if blowing billions on 12 different types of cholesterol drugs is more important than finding a new treatment for malaria, which is still treated using drugs from the 1950s. Vaccines are still produced using chicken eggs, a 1940s technology. Nobody bothers to research new superior ways of doing so because it's not profitable. But lifestyle drugs such as the three different impotence drugs on the market rake in billions of dollars in profits, especially in the US where people are free to spend money on them, and advertising them is legal.
This collider cost four times its original budget, but construction pressed on. At least the US had the good sense to pull the plug on that ridiculous Superconducting Supercollider that had become the butt of jokes, despite the whining of the overgrown geeks. When human curiosity starts eating up billions of dollars while billions of people starve, it's time to stop and reassess priorities. What happens if no bosons are found? CERN is still on the hook for all those loans, and likely goes under. Heck, even if they DO find a boson, CERN may have trouble making payments. This is like buying a 60 inch plasma high definition TV, then losing your house because you overextended yourself. Fat good all your toys do you when you're sleeping in your Lexus. |
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LeKiwi
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 8:47 pm Post subject: |
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| pezar wrote: | | LeKiwi wrote: |
The thing that annoys me most about it is that yes, it is very interesting and all that, but surely that money could have been spent on, oh, I don't know, maybe putting in some wells in third world countries so people have access to clean water, or on education in those same places, or helping the farmers become self-sufficient so famine is no more... you know, stuff that might actually make a difference to the large percentage of the population who struggle to survive? |
Precisely. The scientists sound like a schoolboy who is tearing apart a car radio for the first time. It seems solely to exist to satisfy the curiosity of a handful of overgrown geeks who have never had to, say, scrounge for a handful of morsels of food each day then wonder where one's next handful of moldy flour is coming from tomorrow, like the over 1 billion people who live on less than $1 a day do. It reminds me of such things as the experiments in magnetic resonance imaging in the 1960s. Ultimately, they produced a scanner that allows overgrown medical geeks to peer into the workings of the human brain, but which has very little if any real impact on an Ethiopian farmer worried about drought.
The West's culture seems to produce this weird disconnect, as if blowing billions on 12 different types of cholesterol drugs is more important than finding a new treatment for malaria, which is still treated using drugs from the 1950s. Vaccines are still produced using chicken eggs, a 1940s technology. Nobody bothers to research new superior ways of doing so because it's not profitable. But lifestyle drugs such as the three different impotence drugs on the market rake in billions of dollars in profits, especially in the US where people are free to spend money on them, and advertising them is legal.
This collider cost four times its original budget, but construction pressed on. At least the US had the good sense to pull the plug on that ridiculous Superconducting Supercollider that had become the butt of jokes, despite the whining of the overgrown geeks. When human curiosity starts eating up billions of dollars while billions of people starve, it's time to stop and reassess priorities. What happens if no bosons are found? CERN is still on the hook for all those loans, and likely goes under. Heck, even if they DO find a boson, CERN may have trouble making payments. This is like buying a 60 inch plasma high definition TV, then losing your house because you overextended yourself. Fat good all your toys do you when you're sleeping in your Lexus. |
Couldn't have put it better myself. (Though I'm a naturopathy student; don't get me started on the pharmaceutical industry and their money-games...  ).
Tis a strange place to be living in, this Earth. But I guess those billion people are more or less out of sight, out of mind, right? 
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jrknothead
Impatience rarely succeeds
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 8:59 pm Post subject: |
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Oh, puhleeze... if either of you cared anything for starving ethiopians, You wouldn't have bought computers with your excess cash, you'd have sent the money to feed the hungry...
A personal computer is completely unnecessary for anyone to own, yet billions of people have them. We buy them because we want them, and we can afford them.
It's the same with the Large Hadron Collider... people who had money to spare bought it to expand knowledge, and they spent a whole lot less for it than the total spent for personal computers.
Besides, I seem to remember the whole world getting together and sending the ethiopians tons of food, which ended up rotting on loading docks because they couldn't get their act together.
I say leave the ethiopians to their own devices, eventually they'll stop fighting each other long enough to solve their own problems, and you can be sure there will be plenty of people willing to help them when they do.
Until then, I'll keep buying a new computer every year, and governments who can afford it will keep financing the quest for scientific knowledge. |
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LeKiwi
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 9:05 pm Post subject: |
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| jrknothead wrote: | | Oh, puhleeze... if either of you cared anything for starving ethiopians, You wouldn't have bought computers with your excess cash, you'd have sent the money to feed the hungry... |
That's exactly what I do. Don't comment on what you don't know - a large percentage of my spare time goes towards charities and helping out people less fortunate than myself, both at home and overseas.
| jrknothead wrote: | | A personal computer is completely unnecessary for anyone to own, yet billions of people have them. We buy them because we want them, and we can afford them. |
In this day and age they are necessary for many people. I couldn't work if I didn't have my laptop, and without my job I couldn't keep doing the charity work I do or making the monthly donations I make. If you're blessed enough to live in a country where you can get an education and a job and have a bit of spare cash then as far as I'm concerned it's your job as a human being to help out those who were unfortunate enough to have been born in a country where they don't have those opportunities to better themselves and as a result literally struggle to even eat. It's a roll of the dice what kind of a country you're born into; you can hardly blame them for drawing the proverbial short straw.
As far as I can tell, those people at CERN are members of the human race and have masses of cash to spare. Finding what they'll find will be interesting, yes, but it doesn't solve the problem of the billion or so people who have to walk 40km every day in searing heat just to get to water that might be slightly clean so they can have a drink and cook their few scraps of food.
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Fnord
Metasyntactic Variable
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Joined: May 07, 2008
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 9:07 pm Post subject: |
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I was part of the Somalian relief effort in the early 1990's. Imho, it was a waste of time, money, and effort. Plus, it put a lot of non-Somalians in danger from those Somalis who were armed, and who saw each of us as a potential hostage.
While I won't say, "Let 'em rot", I will suggest that people can not be helped if they don't want to be helped; and if they don't want help, then don't help them. |
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Orwell
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 9:07 pm Post subject: Re: Day of reckoning for the Large Hadron Collider... |
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| pezar wrote: | | Curiosity doesn't justify the price tag. |
Science for the sake of discovering truth is a worthy endeavor in itself. But anyways, pure research that may not have any apparent purpose now could well be useful in the future.
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Fnord
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 9:11 pm Post subject: Re: Day of reckoning for the Large Hadron Collider... |
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| Orwell wrote: | | pezar wrote: | | Curiosity doesn't justify the price tag. |
Science for the sake of discovering truth is a worthy endeavor in itself. But anyways, pure research that may not have any apparent purpose now could well be useful in the future. |
Agreed, Orwell. And I might point out that exorbitant expenditures have been made, and grandiose structures have been built by many so-called "charitable" institutions, such as churches and other religious institutions. Faith alone does not justify those price tags, either. |
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LeKiwi
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 9:14 pm Post subject: |
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| Fnord wrote: | I was part of the Somalian relief effort in the early 1990's. Imho, it was a waste of time, money, and effort. Plus, it put a lot of non-Somalians in danger from those Somalis who were armed, and who saw each of us as a potential hostage.
While I won't say, "Let 'em rot", I will suggest that people can not be helped if they don't want to be helped; and if they don't want help, then don't help them. |
I understand the problem and I hear it alot. I guess Sudan is the most relevent recent example. All it says to me though is that people need to get more creative in getting the aid to the people who actually need it - it's a minority who get in the way, and the majority of the laypeople who suffer. Not sure how, but where there's a will there's a way, I'm sure it can be done if people think outside the box. (Maybe they need some aspie assistance?!)
I accept that the LHC could well come up with things that may be useful in the future, but regardless, there are more immediate problems in the here and now.
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Orwell
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 9:16 pm Post subject: |
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| LeKiwi wrote: | | I accept that the LHC could well come up with things that may be useful in the future, but regardless, there are more immediate problems in the here and now. |
Those who do not think far enough ahead invariably have problems near at hand.
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