RE: Connecting the fate of the universe to the Higgs boson
I think your comment is related to the LHC. If not please correct me.
Understanding how the universe works has a cost. That is true. And the money could be invested otherwise, that is true too. However, being against fundamental research means being against progress. Fundamental research in the 1910s means the GPS system today, to quote a single example. However, let's compute numbers differently.
We are first talking here about a very small amount of money (taking the number of countries investing in it, and the amount of money this is for each country). Secondly, the return on the investment is larger than the investment itself (the money to be spent to run those machines is given back to the society, the salary of the people involved when they move to something else, etc..., we can do the cost-benefit analysis and check by ourselves). The only point I want to mention is that on top of science itself, running those huge experiments is cheap for the society and the return could be huge in terms of a potential discovery. Okay maybe not today, but maybe in 100 years.
Thx for your answer, I agree that it will deliver other good things from this,
but I struggle to see why we have managed to figure out the higgs boson particle, whilst a fundamental solution to drought and femine could probably have been found years ago if we put our priorities there. But no Higgs Boson is a far more important discovery. In the meantime some poor bloke in a basement is trying to figure out how to condensate water from dry desert air and is succesful at it......... Now I can't help but wonder if instead of the LHC for instance or any other project that is being subsidised by governments this money would have been given to those who are really trying to solve the biggest issue on this planet,
Which is the gross inequality of life standards.
We fail as human beings if with all the resources we have we can't simply provide everyone with at least a basic standard of living.
I know it isn't that easy, but I can't help but think our focus should be more towards that man in the garage that has good intentions.
I am just mentioning higgs boson or Cern now, but I pretty much mean that any type of technology we create or work on that is not working towards figuring out a solution for helping people in poor regions who deal with femine and don't even have clean water whilst the rhe rest of us is worried about building space ships and leaving this earth etc.. etc.
I somehow have the feeling we are spending our resources on less than urgent matters. Yes by finding particles we might find other solutions, but what if we spent those technologies on first and foremost making this world a better place for everyone.
I would rather give trillions to someone trying to condensate water out of dry air then someone building a particle accelerator.
Perhaps there is an argument to building that accelerator instead of solving all the other issues first, but I struggle to see it.
Maybe is it a matter on not betting everything on the same horse? it is important to keep our minds open and not to focus on a single domain of science. Getting rid of particle physics may at the end of the day allow for reallocating money elsewhere, but remember that all major changes in our lifes can be traced back to fundamental research. Is it a bet you want to make?
On top of that, any single piece of technology developed at CERN is unpatented. What would all the people saved from cancer by hadrontherapy say?
I am not saying that the other problems you mentioned are not important, but research to a solution should be also funded and not funded instead of something else. The problem is that the pie is here very limited. And thus everyone is fighting to get everyone else's share.
Well I am all for diversification, but I think that certain areas are not as well funded as others. Yes I agree peoples lifes have been saved by technological breakthroughs created by cern/ Nasa to name a few, but when I then read a small article about a possible solution to water shortages, or a way to solve food shortages in areas where it is so needed. It feels wrong to me that as advanced as we are, we struggle to fix the most basic of issues.
Is that because we really can't fix it or are we just not that interested?
It leads me to to think we are focussing to much money on research that is of less importance.
Wouldn't you say we fail here?
I like your articles by the way! So will follow 😄!
Believe if or not, particle physics is not well funded at all. Our golden age is way behind us. The impression it is well funded may be that the funding is coming from several tens of countries funding all together CERN. This being said and as already mentioned, CERN is giving back a lot of money (operating costs, open access guarantees for the rest of the world, etc..) and not all research at CERN is LHC research (hadrotherapy, antimatter, neutrinos, etc...).
Take any other field, and multiply by the number of countries, and what you will find is surprizing. It is 10000 easier to get funding for nanoscience, for instance. I do not know, with the example you mentioned, why it is tough to get funding. Industries may be interested. There are open calls for such things, probably even more than for fundamental research.
To me, the real problem is that there is not enough money allocated to research at all, so that one cannot diversify as we should (even internally to a field of research). As a results, the different field are fighting against each other to get a larger share. Which is also what you say, in some sense.
PS: thanks for reading (and discussing ;) ).