Higgs Boson Found

[dlouhys]

No.

Because it being a human endevour encourages cooperation and discourages competition. You may think this hand-holding view of science is nice and utopia but it's actually nightmarish. It encourages uniformity and creates an atmosphere of dogmas. Science, being filled with extremely smart and arrogant individuals, is extremely political. It also allows for consolidation of projects, which slows down the rate of advancement as countries find they can invest less by spreading costs between multiple partners.

This lack of competition discourages future investment and risk taking. You want competition. You want rivals. This will encourage risk taking and creative, different approaches.

In the case of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the actual cost of CERN becoming the global hub of particle phycists is Americans up and moving there just as Europeans moved here in the 1930s and 1940s.

What happened in Europe was a 50 year physics brain drain. Same thing is going to happen here.

Well yes and no.

Necessity and drive lead to a lot of doors....the space race for one. But it's really hard to say if you're better of with 20 scientists that will "work together" versus 100s that want to be published. You can really make cases for either on why it's poor form.

[Orlong]

Actually my comment was more along the lines of "We could have had it 10 years ago if we weren't absolutely retarded".

It was a commentary about the awful consequences of poorly made American political decisions, not about Europe.

I mean the fact remains, the Superconducting Super collider would have been far larger than the LHC... but we canceled it to save the smallest amount of money.

Thats because governments shouldnt be funding this crap with tax dollars. Let the private industry do it. If its so important then they will put their money into it. We pay MORE than enough fricken taxes already. Government should have 2 and only 2 functions. National defense and law enforcement

[Wikiy]

Thats because governments shouldnt be funding this crap with tax dollars. Let the private industry do it. If its so important then they will put their money into it. We pay MORE than enough fricken taxes already. Government should have 2 and only 2 functions. National defense and law enforcement

Except the private industry isn't interested in bettering humanity and the world, it's interested in money (although most people are so limited in their thinking that they cannot perceive how investing in science can return money x-fold long-term). We'd get nowhere like that. As for your taxes already being too high, your government spends 2.7% of them on science, and that pays for all technological progress. If opinions like yours were the prevailing ones, we'd still be painting bears on cave walls.

[Piggo]

It means that Europeans investing in the Large Hadron Collider have taken back world leadership in Physics from the United States, leadership we had since World War II.

I sure hope the few billion dollars saved by canceling the Super-Colliding Superconductor to balance the budget and lower taxes in 1994 was worth it. This should have been our victory, 10 years ago.

Congrats Europe.

Why are you saying 'our'? What was your part in building the LHC or discovering the boson? The discovery made by a handful of enlightened minds has nothing to do with the entire population of either US or the whole of Europe.

You patriots are really messed up.

[Adam Jensen]

The anti-science types are such short sighted people. They can't see how science will help them immediately, so they view it with contempt, even when a better understanding of science will, in the long term, benefit mankind. It always has in the past. Almost every discovery we've made has bettered our world by improving our technology and the discoveries that haven't done so, only have not improved our lives due to a lack of our understanding.

Mankind wonders how lightning works and what it is. Now our culture is dependent on electrical power. Mankind investigates general and special relativity. Now our satellites can give us accurate data that would be impossible without those theories. Mankind investigates the structure of the atom. Now we have nuclear power through fission and we're working on nuclear power through fusion. When we started investigating electricity, we had no idea how we were going to harness its power in the future. When Einstein came up with relativity, satellites didn't exist yet, there wasn't a technological use for that theory at the time. When we started looking at the atom in the 1800s, the idea of splitting or fusing a nucleus for power was beyond comprehension.

They didn't investigate these things for an immediate technology, they investigated these things out of curiosity, knowing that the knowledge can be used later to benefit mankind.

Is the higgs field a useless thing to understand? Maybe at this moment, MAYBE. But in a century from now, who knows what technology might arise from understanding how the higgs field works. Maybe we'll find a way to manipulate the higgs field, increasing or reducing an objects mass without removing any matter. Or making an object massless entirely. Who knows? We'll never know if we sit around saying "oh who cares about the higgs boson, it's useless."

And leave it to private corporations? I trust private corporations as far as I can spit. They want to make a profit, nothing more. If it doesn't make them profit, they won't invest in it. That's why we need the government to invest in such things. Private corporations aren't going to do it. There's no money to be made right now in discovering if Mars has life or whether gravity has gravitons or not. But these are ideas we'll want to explore for our future.

Investing in science isn't about now. It's about the future.

[GennGreymane]

No.

Because it being a human endevour encourages cooperation and discourages competition. You may think this hand-holding view of science is nice and utopia but it's actually nightmarish. It encourages uniformity and creates an atmosphere of dogmas. Science, being filled with extremely smart and arrogant individuals, is extremely political. It also allows for consolidation of projects, which slows down the rate of advancement as countries find they can invest less by spreading costs between multiple partners.

This lack of competition discourages future investment and risk taking. You want competition. You want rivals. This will encourage risk taking and creative, different approaches.

In the case of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the actual cost of CERN becoming the global hub of particle phycists is Americans up and moving there just as Europeans moved here in the 1930s and 1940s.

What happened in Europe was a 50 year physics brain drain. Same thing is going to happen here.

your avatar just made this quote even more agreeable.