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CERN's LHC Powers Down For Two Years
An anonymous reader writes "Excitement and the media surrounded the Higgs boson particle for weeks when it was discovered in part by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But now, the collider that makes its home with CERN, the famed international organizational that operates the world's largest particle physics laboratory, is powering down. The Higgs boson particle was first discovered by the LHC in 2012. The particle, essentially, interacts with everything that has mass as the objects interact with the all-powerful Higgs field, a concept which, in theory, occupies the entire universe." We covered the repair announcement last month.
Don't these people realize we're in the 3D printing epoch now? Can they just print out a new LHC in less than two years?
More like the UN got a death threat from the intergalactic Splugorthian empire to cease with our efforts to open an unregulated worm hole. It was ALIENS I tell you!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
or that's what the LHC *wants* CERN to believe.
This downtime means that some parts that aren't open to visits during operations, will be for quite a while. Science tourism rocks!
There's nothing like $HOME
HOW WILL SCIENCING GET DONE!?
I've been involved in enough large scale projects to know why you bring up parts, or underpower the system, and run them to see what breaks. And stuff does break, it's the name of the game.
Still, it's pretty frustrating to watch this shut down for 2 years. We'll be getting results from the Pluto probe about the time this thing comes back up.
Actually, businesses rarely looks farther than 5 years in a business plan.
If a research project can't make a profit in that time, they don't pursue it.
The LHC took 10 years to build, from 1998 to 2008. Therefore nearly all of the physics research that has been performed and its resulting discoveries and breakthroughs would never have happened if it was left to the "free market".
Science and understanding can not progress through simple theory. The ideas must be tested and validated. That's the reason for facilities like this.
Let's just say that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the second hand on the Doomsday clock back by 5.39106E-44 seconds while the LHC is out of service.
There is also the issue of externalities. Discovering something new about the universe would benefit many people, not just the investors who paid for the science. When you have a situation where lots of people will benefit, but the cost tends to be concentrated, you have a good reason for government funding.
But now that they've found the Higgs boson, what are they going to do with it?
I don't know it depends on what clever ideas people come up with. At the moment we are not even sure if it is the Higgs we have produced so we need to study it more. This precisely illustrates why industry will never fund research like this: it is too far ahead of any practical application and may even turn out to just be a stepping stone with no applications of its own but which leads to something amazingly useful. While I could make wild conjectures about what we might be able to discover the best way to understand the case for fundamental science like this is to look back.
In the early 1900's Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus and you could have wondered exactly the same thing: what is anyone going to do with it now we know it is there. Well 40 years later it lead directly to a new source of power. However indirectly it let us understand atoms far better. That understanding, along with quantum mechanics gave use an understanding of materials that led to the invention of the silicon transistor, an invention that has literally transformed the entire planet. I very much doubt Rutherford, or anyone on the planet at the time, had even the tiniest clue that this would be the result of this discovery.
Sadly it seems that the cry for immediate, short term applied science is getting stronger and stronger. What the industry types who are calling for this need to understand is that they are turkeys asking for christmas. Sure it might be nice to have all those fundamental research dollars wrapped up under the christmas tree and given to you to build a better widget but once those presents are opened and gone there will be no more fundamental research you can apply to build the next generation of widgets. It's then that they will realize who society will eat for dinner...
Yeah!
Like that travesty that is NASA...if there was value to space exploration at all, then the free market would have stepped up in the 1960's and put a man on the moon!
Oh, wait a minute. There was no short-term profit and the R&D cost was so amazing only a government could pull it off.
Well, it isn't like there's long list of tangential advances that benefit all the rest of us now and which allow corporations to profit directly from.
Oh, wait.
Sure the government's main job is common defense, but seriously, if everything was left up to the free market we'd be no where near what we have now. I'm not even going to get into what NIH has done for the common good.
Rutherford worked with, maybe, a thousand dollars worth of gear, and was producing results (ie world record radio transmission distances).
Right. So if we are going to start looking at things outside fundamental research you may possibly have heard of something called the world wide web - if not try Googling it. ;-) Now, look up where it was invented and why. Doing fundamental research can have spinoffs just as much now as it did in Rutherford's day.
As for the cost of research yes it does cost more to find the Higgs - we need protons with about one million times more energy than the alpha particles Rutherford used. Since nature does not provide a nice portable source of these like there are for alpha particles we have to make it which is more expensive.
As for the practicality as I was explaining fundamental research is almost always non-practical when it is first discovered as was the case for Rutherford's nucleus. It takes time to apply this knowledge to the benefit on mankind. What your ignorance may be blinding you to is the fact that all new "widgets" that IT companies produce today rely on an understanding of the fundamental physics of ~100 years ago. If you stop fundamental research then, once the ideas based on out current understanding of physics are used up that's it - no more new widgets. A colleague of mine had a good way of putting it: no amount of applied research will give you the electric light bulb starting with a candle: you have to have fundamental research to be able to make that leap.