You got this one wrong. We need to progress and have reached the point where progressing costs big money.
There are other benefits as well. The infrastructure built to handle the sheer amounts of data is an experiment in itself and probably as valuable than the Hadron bit.
Because big government don't understand it and don't really care it is actually a great acheivement.
Now, the Olympics are....
For once... really couldn't care less. This could well be the best £34mn ever spent with future technologies etc.
It was worth every penny to have seen Denzil Dexter, complete with beard and sandals, telling us about it on Newsnight. Plus Professor Branestawm, when asked to explain what this thing was that they were looking for, pointing to a blackboard covered in mathematical scrambled egg and smiling hopefully. Britain needs people like that.
I suppose we ought to be grateful we are not paying £34m to have them write rap music.
Let's get something right: CERN do not have a space plane and the LHC cannot kill the universe. The latter is more absurd than the former.
What you should be thinking about is that a lot of that money goes to pay and train researchers who will spend most of their career working in British industry. The average grad student does not work as a post doctoral research assistant. Trust me - I am a PDRA, and after 2 years I am the only researcher left in my physics department from my graduation year. To my knowledge, only 3 of 15 grad students went into academia.
In my experience, leavers tend to go out and work on profitable enterprises that would not exist if they had not had 4 years of honing research skills (programming, mathematics, hardware development, computational simulations etc.) already. And no - business would not pay for this training, because it creates competitors - which is good for the consumer, and bad for vested interests.
Don't get confused too much by the science, the economics of such spending is simple, and positive. While we may worry about whether the physics result is worth close to £100m, the boot-strapping effect such research has on other segments of industry.
You never know what's going to come out of CERN... the World Wide Web for instance 
Completely disagree on this one. Among other things, advances in medical imaging techniques such as MRI and PET owe their existence (at least in part!) to similar experiments.
And did you know that some fit bird from CERN once helped save the Vatican?
At least, I hope she did - I'm only halfway through the book right now.
I'm not concerned about this, either. What was that line in that Prince song about people starving while we're sending people to the moon? Money spent on scientific research is a drop in the ocean really, and may at least eventually bring tangible benefits to humanity as we learn more about the universe.
The EU, on the other hand...
Where exactly can I get a good pint of beer for 28.4p a pint?
"beer is safer"!!
How many deaths a year are caused by beer?
Wat, don't forget the other black hole, the Joint European Torus at Culham. This baby is now the European Fusion Development Agreement JET - ITER. (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor).
Any chance of a thermo-nuclear explosion at JET-ITER being swallowed by a black hole generated at CERN.
Christ; that would be a hell of a night out. I see you are back on the anti-freeze at 28.4p a pint.
Wat,
Would you like to propose another way of funding this kind of research?
‘28.4p a pint’! What’s your name? Eight Ace?
£5 billion is no more than Gordon Brown would piss away in a futile attempt to buy an election, if he thought it would improve his chance of winning.
No one knows exactly where the understanding that might come from the LHC will lead us. That’s why the experiments are worth doing. And, yes, it is a lot of money and maybe it will turn out to have been waste. But I think it’s worth trying.
So far, one incidental minor side product from CERN, the World Wide Web, is already worth more than the cost of the LHC project. To put it into proportion against your £5 billion cost, Google’s market cap is $131 billion. A recent report estimated that US and European web advertising spend was worth $27 billion in 2007, expected to rise to $44 billion in 2010 (of which the UK represents $8 billion). Add all the other benefits of the web, such as on-line commerce, more efficient markets, cheaper publishing, accessibility of information, education, etc., etc. Do you not think it’s ironic that the medium you have used to criticise LHC is itself in part a product of CERN.
However, that isn’t really the point of LHC. Maybe the web would have arisen spontaneously if the money had been spent on beer.
Other potential technology benefits include advances in cryogenics and superconductivity (useful to transmit electricity efficiently); better superconducting magnets (maybe handy if you need a scan); better gamma cameras for PET scanners; improved data processing for imaging; better signal processing (useful in medical imaging); advances in computer control; Grid computing (maybe the Next Big Thing, maybe not); quantum dosimetry (if you need to measure radiation); new ways to make radioisotopes; novel flat panel solar collectors; advances in microelectronics and materials.
These are not hypothetical; they are patented inventions that the Technology Transfer office at CERN can license to you today. Who knows what the bright minds at CERN, challenged by working at the limits of technology, will come up with next? However, that isn’t really the point of LHC either.
If we are to keep advancing as a civilisation, we need to continue to ask hard questions and then try to answer them with experiments that provide evidence through observations. Otherwise we descend into theory, speculation, superstition and religion.
I would be interested to know what’s inside the bits that are inside an atom. I would be interested to know how matter and energy fits together with the forces of magnetism and electricity, the atomic forces and gravity. I would be interested to know why the universe is much heavier than visible bits of it suggest. I would be interested to know how the universe started, what is beyond what we can see and where it might end.
I think that’s the point of LHC.
Or you could have your £1.49 to spend on Ace, go home, bray the bairns and sleep it off in a leaky shed.
Wat, I thought that you are anti 'dumbing down', but you seem to have put your foot in it this time. I, too, have a Physics degree, so celebrate all those developments that have come from pure science - and regret that this country has lagged behind in supporting it - yet still our Physicists are there in force at CERN.
you're an idiot, and I see not even your usual band of reactionary sycophants can find a supportive comment this time.
do you lay awake at night, terrified that something is going to change? you understand that this is the nature of the world, yes? things don't stand still.
Commenting by HaloScan
