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India To Build Neutrino Observatory
TeriMaKiChooth writes "Only the fifth in the world, the facility is being called one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific projects ever undertaken by India. About 90 scientists from 26 organizations will be involved in the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), organizers say. Neutrinos are elusive, nearly mass-less elementary particles, sometimes called 'ghost particles.'"
is a real bad swear word!
I do not see how this type of project is sanctioned by the Indian government. Half the population is living in slums Most parts of the country have only intermittant electricty There is almost no safe water (by Western European standards) The majority of the population is functionally illiterate. The roads are amongst the most dangerous in the world Pollution (air, water, and waste) is a HUGE problem I suggest that this money could be better spent addressing those problems
I could be wrong, but I feel that progress needs to happen on all fronts. Research, industry, infrastructure, quality of life, etc. are all things that need to be invested in at the same time. The problems you speak of don't have silver-bullet cures - you have to work on them for generations. What will you do till then? Suspend all research spending? At any rate, I'm amazed at the conviction you demonstrate when discussing such issues. You're either a genius (who really has solutions) or someone who hasn't thought this through well enough.
People forget that when one builds something (e.g. Neutrino observatory) the money doesn't go to bricks and detectors. Eventually all the money goes to people. In order to build the observatory you need builders and other low-tech workers in addition to the all-knowing scientists.
Big projects such as this create jobs. And even after it is completed, it will continue to employ many people, both educated and uneducated. The road to progress goes through development, not through throwing money at people directly. Enter cliche: If you give a man a fish, you give him a meal for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you give him a meal for his whole life long.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Sorta, but not exactly. Sure, it eventually trickles and creates that Keynesian multiplier.
But, and here's the important part, so would spending that money on something more useful like schools or water pumps. The money spent on those would create just as many jobs, you know, and you'd also have some schools or clean water instead of a national penis size symbol.
Think of it this way. If you spend X dollars, a Keynesian multiplier of Y says effectively you've put X*Y dollars into the economy. But if you invested that original X into something pointless, effectively you now only have X*(Y-1) that actually goes into anything the country actually needs. Unless Y is at least in the hundreds, you'll still see a difference.
And actually a more reasonable multiplier to expect is somewhere around 1.25 to 1.5. The highest ever multiplier recorded for a government investment was 1.73.
So basically even if you're uber-lucky, a million invested in useless crap will also bring 730,000 that trickles into more useful stuff. Whereas if you invested that million into something useful, well, now you'd have 1.73 million worth of useful stuff.
Basically that multiplier isn't a blank check to do any stupidity whatsoever with the public money. It doesn't mean you can just blow it on any crap and let the multiplier distribute it for you. At the end of the day, a million wasted is still a million wasted.
But it gets even better, actually. The multiplier itself is different for different things you do with the money. A million invested in something could have a multiplier as low as 0.23 (actual historical case too: yes, it's possible for such an investment to actually be a loss) or as high as 1.73. Like any investment, basically, you get a different ROI. It doesn't mean just blow the money or anything and expect it to trickle just the same.
Or in less complicated terms, think of it like this: a country has a certain amount of resources, including manpower. Tying up X thousand people into one project (including making those bricks and supplying the factory and whatnot) means X thousand you won't have for something else. Even if it creates Y thousand other jobs somewhere else too, that original X thousand is still tied up in activity A instead of activity B. If A is less needed than B, that's not a good use of manpower.
Also, I'd say that one should look at the actual conditions in a country before cheering for a waste. The exact multiplier and number of jobs created depend a lot on the local conditions. The way it works in a western post-scarcity economy, where really at worst you just diverted some people from marketing jobs and services and other ultimately just ways to do something when you don't need them in actual production, may not be the same for a country which still has a scarcity economy.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I could be wrong, but I feel that progress needs to happen on all fronts. Research, industry, infrastructure, quality of life, etc.
Ideed $270 million could be used to give everyone in the country 24 cents or provide an incentive for the best and brightest to stay in the country and for bonus points inject money into the Indian high tech industrys.
I do not see how this type of project is sanctioned by the Indian government.
With money that is bookmarked for such projects. Believe it or not, third world countries have finance ministers who plan and reserve portions of funds for different causes and do not simply dole out cash to whoever asks for it.
Half the population is living in slums
Nonsense, unless you call the huts that a lot of tribes live in or cabins built in the mountains as slums too. People are fairly self-sufficient and are generally healthier than the average city yuppie. A very small number of people are actually in such a dire situation that they're dying from starvation.
Most parts of the country have only intermittant electricty
Rural areas do have this problem, but every place from small towns and cities have regular power supply. It is definitely not a problem in "most" of the country.
There is almost no safe water (by Western European standards)
There are almost no people with weak immune systems (by Western European standards)
The majority of the population is functionally illiterate.
Now where did you get that from? And what do you mean by that?
The roads are amongst the most dangerous in the world
They're definitely not as safe as the ones in the more developed countries.
Pollution (air, water, and waste) is a HUGE problem
in the entire world, not just in India.
I assume it's a reference to geoneutrinos, produced by nuclear decays/reactions in the Earth's core:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/22737
xterm -n 8
As a physicist, let me say... If this was research that offered immediate benefits to the country (like a new medicine), then I could understand it.
As a physicist, you should know better.
Once upon a time I was a neutrino physicist, both at one of the large labs (SNO) and on a small reactor neutrino experiment. A table-top detector I designed actually detected reactor neutrinos.
Since that distant day I've worked mostly as a software designer and medical physicist. I've run my own business, and I'm an adjunct professor in the Department of Pathology at the local university helping the biologists and MDs deal with the large numerical datasets that genomic technology is producing. For my next career I'm trying to decide between robotics and poetics, and will probably do some of both.
I can do that diversity of things because of the kind of education I got as a physicist. In the course of the past fifteen years I've intereacted heavily with biologists, pathologists, cardiac surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, chemists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and software developers, and because of the foundations my education rests on I have been able to learn to communicate with all of them quite effectively, and contribute to a number of projects that are likely to make the world a better place.
Projects like this Indian neutrio detector are factories for the production of people like me, and personally I'm arrogant enough to think that India could use a few more people like me. I've worked with physicists from all of the world--the US, Canada, Poland, and Israel, the UK, Sri Lanka, Australia, China...--and the Indians I've known have been as good as any. Projects like this will help keep them in India, where when they leave academia--which is the most common outcome for PhDs in any discipline--their skills and education will be more likely to be applied to local problems.
It is utterly myopic to attack a project like this as not addressing India's problems. It is ONLY projects like this that will solve them, by creating the only thing that will ever solve them: highly trained, intelligent, mathematically an technologically literate, curious, empirically-oriented human beings.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
1. Half the population is living in slums. - Incorrect. According to J Urban Health. 2007 May; 84(Suppl 1): 27–34. , 28% of the Urban population, which is itself ~40% of total lives in slums. You have a roughly 200% error in your estimate.
2. India also has a educated middle class equivalent to the population of Central Europe.
3. India has a burgeoning economy with the second highest growth rate at about 8.5%
4. India has a developing science program, ranking in the top 5 countries with nuclear and space technologies.
5. You have an incorrect assumption that throwing more money at a problem solves it faster. Even if it did, the social disruption caused by solving a problem can create new ones. Sometimes, deep-rooted problems that were developed over centuries of colonization have to be solved at a controlled rate, on the same time scales.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Considering India's GDP growth rate is among the highest in the world, I'm not sure if they ought to be listening to advice from nations with stagnant GDP growth or negative GDP growth.
Fix your own economy first before preaching. And if you believe your own words, don't breathe, don't take bathroom breaks, until you get out of a recession.
Keep in mind that India's space program is a profit-center. It actually _earns_ more money than the govt. spends on it. That's because placing satellites into orbit is big business, and high-tech services like satellite launches sell for hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
South Korea and India were of similar economic situations in 1950, the difference being that S. Korea poured money into technology, and India did what you suggested. Guess what? Getting homeless people to fish just creates lots of poor fishermen instead of lots of poor beggars. Big whoop. The goal is to create more jobs for scientists, physicists, researchers, lab assistants, programmers, etc.
Plus, India's tax rate is far lower than in Western Europe, and 90% of people are not taxed. So the amount they spend is a tiny drop in the bucket of the annual income of people.
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_India#Tax_Rates
"about 10 per cent of the population meets the minimum threshold of taxable income"
So 90% of the population pays 0% taxes. And the progressive tax rates for the remainder of the population go from 10% to a maximum of 30% tax.
As for literacy, the "majority" of Indians are not illiterate, 32% are illiterate as of 2007, which is still a big number, but not a majority. Much of that illiterate population was born circa 1950. In the age group 7-15, literacy is 90% (10% illiterate).
Moreover, your presumption that they "prefer to spend their money being number 6, than cleaning up their house" is childish if not outright moronic. India's economy is $1.2 trillion dollars, and the project costs $270 million. That's 0.02% of the economy. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to a 19 second bathroom break a day. And let's not forget that the project could be profitable, and in the very least provides good high-end jobs for their increasingly educated population.
Compare $270 million with the numerous welfare and social programs India provides to poor people. $13 billion to subsidize food for low-income families. $12 billion to subsidize fertilizer for poor farmers. $7 billion for education (at the federal level, states pay more). The list goes on for social programs that are all near $10 billion each.
In the end, they have a democracy and if folks don't like the budget, they'll elect other folks in. Every nation's budget is going to have cutting-edge R&D. It's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Overall, their nation is doing fine, rapidly progressing with envious growth rates. It's not _your_ tax money being spent (and even for Indians, it's only the tax money of the upper 10%), so relax and let them build a nutrino research facility. If you're interested in nutrinos, I'm sure they'll love for you to pay them money to use their research center.