The Next Big Particle Accelerator

Guinnessy writes "This year more than a thousand physicists gathered for three weeks at Snowmass Village, in the Colorado Rockies near Aspen, to talk about the future of particle physics in the US. Physics Today has a report on the meeting which says that the community should build a 500-GeV electron-positron linear collider. That's powerful enough to make mini black holes."

Comments

Science

[virg_mattes]

> As long as there are people living below the poverty line, blue
> skies projects like this should not get funding from the federal government.

Although I understand your point, there are a few issues to consider. The first is that, since the poverty line is more or less a percentage measure, there will always be people below it (it's like saying, "until everyone earns in the top 60 percent wage bracket"). The second is that there will always be social issues that require funding, but it's very short-sighted to say there should be no funding for science until all of the relevant social issues are solved, since all of the relevant social issues will never get solved, and pure science research often leads to practical applications that solve some of the social issues. You must always remember that funding is never an all-or-nothing proposition, and it shouldn't be. The developers of radio science could never have imagined that someday their ideas would be used (in MRI) to diagnose diseases without surgery, and saying that such studies shouldn't have been funded until we cured all diseases would have been very short-sighted.

In short, most funding poured into scientific studies is wasted. The problem is, you never know beforehand which projects will be duds and which will transform the world. So, we must strike a balance, and this particular machine has showed much promise in revealing new secrets, so its price tag may very well be paid back with a cure for cancer or cheap, renewable energy that will make coal- and oil-fired power plants obsolete.

Virg