LHC back online in ten..nine......

LHC back online in ten..nine......

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anonymous-user

Original Poster:

55 months

Thursday 5th March 2015
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http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-311627...
This sounds very interesting!
Seems like there is real anticipation of new discoveries that may well rock our world.

anonymous-user

Original Poster:

55 months

Thursday 5th March 2015
quotequote all
Have faith!
These people have broken records, have made important discoveries and, I'm certain, will continue to do so.

anonymous-user

Original Poster:

55 months

Friday 6th March 2015
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Isn't there value in knowledge?

The Higgs Boson took half a century to be found and LHC found it. If we want to know about how things are then we have to seek the answer. Is there a better way of trying to find these things than the LHC? As it is it may be that LHC teaches us how to build a machine that will detect, that it will be maintained, modified and upgraded until it finds more. Surely better than doing nothing?

anonymous-user

Original Poster:

55 months

Friday 6th March 2015
quotequote all
Moonhawk said:
Watchman said:
How is it funded and do those supplying the cash expect a return. If so, how?

It's fascinating stuff but considering the money sunk into it, I'd expect someone would want a return on their investment. The US govt presumably got something out of the space programme - even it was *just* the capability to launch satellites.
We may not know what practical applications the information from the LHC may have for decades.

Take lasers as an example - Einstein first predicted their existence from his equations in 1917 - it took 11 years for somebody to confirm their existence experimentally - and many decades for real world applications to become commonplace.

What would the world be like now had somebody scrapped laser research a they couldn't think of an immediate application or that it wasn't going to give an immediate return?
I doubt they would be missed, just like everything else that hasn't yet been discovered or developed.

I'm not saying I'm against them or any technological development, but surely that's the case?

As for the LHC, maybe slower development with a significantly lower budget might be more appropriate given the rather more pressing issues we have at the moment?