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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.
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.