You will find that all your points are being addressed. Why do you think there are research stations in Antarctica and Greenland? By the way, if you care to look at the thickness of the ice on the Antarctic or Greenland, you will I think agree that issues of topography and water table are somewhat irrelevant.
The guy who taught me statistical analysis (Prof. Max Hammerton) once presented a paper to the British Association showing that Pluto would one day disappear. The four estimates of its size showed a steady decline which he extrapolated. He then put on his calculated error bars, which showed that early measurements were hugely optimistic (they took values close to the maximum range) and on this basis the simplest explanation was that Pluto was near the bottom of the error ranges. People just wanted to believe that Pluto was bigger than it is.
Max was vindicated when Pluto was downgraded a year or so ago, but so strong is the force of belief that some astronomers are sztill trying to reinstate it.
This error relates to Jan/Feb 2009 only. The problem has been identified quickly. It will be fixed quickly. No big deal.
For the climate change deniers among you, this is how science is supposed to work. Scientist A says something, scientist B says "hang on my experiment gives different results", scientist A checks and says "sorry, yes, we goofed" and it gets fixed. This is exactly the opposite of religion, where Religious Bigot A says "the Earth is 6000 years old", scientists B through aleph-null say "hang on, geology, biology and astronomy confirm this is rubbish", and Religious Bigot A says "you lie, the Earth is 6000 years old."
There is a British "science writer" named Nigel Calder who claims that AGW is a huge fraud by the scientific establishment, and that counter-evidence is always suppressed. This little episode shows that Calder is speaking out of his anus, which means it may serve some useful purpose.
Will the inhabitants of those "off-world colonies" survive? We are far less likely to adapt to their conditions. The change of getting wiped out before sustainability is reached is rather high (look at the history of the colonisation of the Americas). Meanwhile, the amount of energy it takes to put even small payloads into orbit is enormous. We could easily reduce our planet to below sustainability in trying to create colonies, all of which would then fail for lack of resources. We've just done this to our economy by trying to make it expand too fast, so we have a track record.
Research on Earth into dealing with external threats such as infalling asteroids or comets, dealing with diseases, dealing with our own inbuilt tendency to commit genocide, is far cheaper and more likely to pay dividends. Let's protect ourselves from disease and space rocks first, then we will be demonstrating our adaptability and survival skills. Running for the hills is monkey behavior, dealing with the predators may be what made us human in the first place. After all, we could realistically have a basic comet and asteroid shield by 2030.
I repeat: the idea of space colonies is currently not even science fiction, it's religion. Which was my original point.
You don't understand the Theory of Evolution. There is NO "next logical step" for a species which develops intelligence, and there is NO reason why not colonising space makes us a "dead end branch". As the late, great Jay Gould has pointed out, the main form of life on Earth (by biomass and by effect on the planet) is now, and has been for a very long time, bacteria. Bacteria achieve great adaptability without intelligence. If we cannot achieve the same adaptability, then environmental changes may make us extinct. But the test of evolutionary success is simply continued, unthreatened existence, not some hypothetical extension of range. If we "nuke ourselves", we've failed. If we learn to live in our existing environment without making it unusable, and adapt to its changes, we've succeeded. The idea that we must colonise space to validate our existence is a religion, not science.
Before the troll mods start up, please let me say I'm not objecting to exploring the Solar System in the slightest (in fact I think it's far more useful than the LHC). I am pointing out that your justification makes no scientific sense.
Batteries are the stumbling block to just about every new technology. Solar PV, electric vehicles, wind power, all become far more economic when battery prices fall. The motor technology to produce good electric vehicles has been around since the 19th century, but has never taken off (except for railed vehicles) because of the lack of suitable batteries. Compared to the IC engine and gearbox, electric transmission has huge advantages - zero power when stationary, motors can be designed to have almost perfect power characteristics, high reliability, light and cheap. Only the battery is a problem.
Don't believe me? Look at a working example, the Vectrix scooter. The drive part of the system is compact, in fact it fits in the rear wheel. No chains, no exhaust. The battery part is large, complex and expensive.
Successful batteries mean no longer wasting platinum on catalysts to clean up IC engine pollution. They mean quieter, cleaner cities. They mean much greater supply security. They mean that the Middle East ceases to be the major danger point for world security, as the US stops worrying about oil supplies.
The water direction reverses. Assuming that its exit velocity is the same as the pipe velocity (possibly incorrect) and that it has a mass transfer of M kg/s at a velocity of V M/s, the momentum change is 2MV per second. Conservation of momentum means that this must be transferred to the "pilot", which because of its direction must oppose the change in momentum the pilot must experience due to gravity. Tension in the pipe opposes any net difference between gravity and lift. If the pipe is blocked the liquid is stationary and there is no change in momentum.
Don't thank me, thank Newton (who is probably currently revolving in his grave at about 3600rpm).
To allow respectable recreational boaters over 50 to be armed with twin torpedo tubes and surface-to-air missiles. As the NRA keeps telling you, an armed society is a polite society.
In your case, you appear not to have understood the Somali problem - the use of small high speed RIBs that can outrun a ship, and will see the fixed mast of a ship at a range that makes it useless for pursuit. You need similar pursuit craft that can quickly put up a mobile OP, and as quickly drop it to avoid observation. Helicopters are expensive to run, probably just too expensive for anti-piracy, balloons cannot be deployed quickly and are themselves higher than the observation point so they can be detected before they detect you. And there is no way a ROV is as good as a human observer in this kind of application, not to mention the problems of controlling it from a RIB at speed - ever been on one of those things?
I guess nobody responding to this post actually knows a damn thing about real world conditions. Fifteen metres above sea level enormously expands your range of vision. Ask any sailor.
One of the earliest uses for balloons and large kites was to tow an elevated observer behind a ship. I guess navies will be extremely interested in this. It's much less visible than a helicopter, cheaper, and safer, yet it permits over-the-horizon observation. Think of pirates off Somalia. Currently they can easily see and avoid ships, but fast patrol boats can't see them beyond a few miles. With one of these a small intercept craft can see the pirates, while remaining almost invisible themselves. Think of it as a floating artillery OP and the uses are obvious.
As I've posted before, this type of "Earth exceptionalism" is more related to the field of religion than science. There is no a priori reason to believe that the Earth is an unusual planet unless you buy in to the creation myths of some peoples who lived in the Near East circa 4000-2000 years ago. (Other societies, such as those of India, believed in a plurality of worlds and intelligent life forms.) Using Occam's Razor we would conclude that our planet revolves around a very ordinary star, everything else observed about our planet suggests it is unexceptional, therefore the emergence of life is likely to be unexceptional. Falsification of the default hypothesis would involve finding an earth-like or near earth-like planet which did not have life on it. Protestant Biblical literalism is not a scientific attitude. So far, the history of science has shown that every form in which exceptionalism has shown up has been found to be wrong, e.g.
Earth is flat disc with crystal dome above
Earth is sphere at centre of solar system
Earth goes around Sun which is centre of Universe
Sun is a star in the Galaxy which is the entire Universe
Unfortunately this isn't really evidence of anything, as grasses contain large amounts of silica, presumably for strength and protection. Whether an organism goes down the calcium carbonate or the silica route depends on its habitat. Oysters are "largely calcium carbonate", but they are definitely not a calcium-based life form.
Many people in the UK believe that Trident is an expensively useless deterrent. Sarkozy said Brown had no idea how to fix the economic crisis. Soon after, there is a submarine collision. Brown was trying to upset Sarkozy while pandering to the right-wing UK tabloids and justifying the cost by using Trident to take on the French. Unfortunately, budget cuts mean that Trident subs are now crewed by mothers of private school kids whose only driving experience is using their Range-Rovers and Grand Cherokees to push poor people off the pavement. There could only be one outcome.
Lots of printers use PowerPC in the low-clock versions. Basically PowerPC was a success everywhere it didn't have to run X86 applications. The PowerPC/X86 thing is a bit like the gas/Diesel engine thing; US consumers think Diesel is the inferior technology because their auto industry fixated on spark ignition early on, and then all the technical, marketing and political decisions were taken with spark ignition in mind. But in the world as a whole, everything from generators to bulk carriers runs on Diesel, it's just that Joe Public is rarely aware of it.
The take down letter made other, unreasonable demands. As I've posted before, it's often the case that from the plaintiff point of view, the weaker the case the stronger the language, and contrariwise for the defendant. This was a weak case so L&L tried to boost it with strong language demanding that Wordpress cease to allow the fake CW to publish any blogs. Wordpress detected it was a weak case and offered the minimum actually needed to comply. And now, people who had no idea that some people think Canon DSLRs are not very good, and have inadequate QA, are suddenly informed on the subject.
I had to issue a takedown notice last year when I discovered that a fake business had stolen the identity of our legitimate business. As a result, we could have been raided by the police and had our equipment taken by them, which could have driven us out of business. The initial response of the website host was to go away. Before I could respond to this, which would have involved a High Court injunction, they obviously took legal advice and I suddenly got a grovel. So I am sympathetic to legitimate takedowns. As you say, part of this one was legitimate. But L&L should have done better than have it drafted by a paralegal, and simply insisted that the genuinely infringing material be removed or fixed, and requested as a matter of courtesy that the blog confine itself to technical matters. Despite their claims to the contrary, lawyers are frequently not the shiniest apples in the barrel.
You are quite right. (Also my parents didn't have to worry about me riding to the library on my bicycle. Our English teacher actually had a set of stock letters which she handed out to us, when she thought we were ready, to give the local librarian, saying in effect "Please can you give so-and-so an adult library ticket." ) In their desire to avoid all censorship, other people are responding to this post suggesting that intrusive parenting is better than censorship. I find that an almost incredibly immature attitude. Parents need to be in a position to give children responsibilities as they become able to accept them, and society can help with this by giving them a measure of protection. The solipsist, nuclear family view that the world is a jungle and that it's solely the job of parents to protect children is derived, I'm afraid, straight from fundamentalist Protestantism (and is the theme of many a Protestant hymn.) It seems to lead to adults who find it hard to be realistic about actual threats and are fearful about thinghs most unlikely to happen.
When we moved to our present house in a small English town, over 20 years ago, our smallest child wandered off down the road and fell over. Very shortly afterwards, an elderly lady emerged from her house, put a plaster on her knee, said "You must belong to the people who moved into X's house" and returned her to us. That's the kind of society I prefer to live in. If it means a measure of censorship of publicly available material, I'd rather have that, quite honestly. My youngest daughter now works with children in an inner city environment and is appalled by how, despite their access to "extreme" material, their lives are actually very culturally impoverished.
The meta-message of the old comics to children was, in fact, that people in uniforms could generally be trusted and that they were people working to make society safe. That's quite a positive message.
Describing something as in the "IT stone age" is simply wild exaggeration. I was in the IT stone age, and I don't notice the tape punch on the side of my netbook. My evil minded suspicion is that the people who write the reviews are (a) quite detached from reality - they have no idea of real world user needs and (b) it's bad news for them if the industry suddenly says "OK, performance is good enough - let's just focus on cost, reliability and power consumption", because they won't have anything to write about.
If anything, the real issue with netbooks is that they are too good for the industry model. They make the majority of laptops look just too big, expensive and heavy. How many CIOs are wondering how many of their sales force really need Thinkpads and could get by quite happily with a netbook, a bluetooth mouse and a small projector? With the same technology in thin clients or low power desktops, you can do everything real users need, give the execs their Asus Lamborghinis or their Macbook Airs, and still save a lot of money at the next refresh.
As noted above, the answer to performance issues is to start fixing bloatware. Microsoft shareholders are rightly asking why so much money goes on very, very speculative R&D, but perhaps they should be asking what would happen if the same effort went into redesigning Office so that (a) it worked really fast on small low power computers and (b) the user interface was properly tailored for small screens. It can be done - Chrome makes more efficient use of small screen real estate than Firefox does, but some real investment could, I'm sure, make the whole thing so much better.
Out there, the real world is suddenly discovering that small cars are more economical, easier to drive and park than big ones, that big houses cost a lot to heat and cool, and that in general despite what marketing tries to tell you bigger is just bigger, not automatically better.
With respect, I don't actually think you've taken the trouble to understand my attitude. If you actually tried to read my post, you might understand that I'm in favor of doing research and commercialising it (it's paid the bills for the last 30 years not counting my previous stint in teaching.) I am, however,not in favor of doing extremely expensive, speculative research at very high energies when there are other problems with potential nearer term solutions that can be investigated at much lower cost. This is the decision that Governments have to make when funding projects. The US Government already decided not to go with the biggest proposed collider. I happen to think they were right and that LHC should be mothballed for a few years, perhaps while engineering knowledge catches up a bit with what they are trying to do. Practically nobody replying to my post has answered this point except by childish name calling and bad analogies.
Fortunately, Government funding bodies have more sense than the average Slashdot poster.
Incidentally, though I consider their views nonsensical, the right-wing think tank the Cato Institute thinks Governments should not use taxpayer money for R&D at all.
I don't think anybody is silly enough to think that the theoretical physics of today is the engineering of tomorrow. The timescales are much bigger than that. For how many years have workable fusion power sources been 20 years in the future? Since the 60s. (The hydrogen bomb dates back to the physics of the 1940s.) The really big successes of physics recently have all been in the field of small things - lasers, semiconductors, magnetic storage, imaging, radio,new states of matter. I doubt you can point me to a single piece of current engineering that has emerged from any particle collider research done in the last 40 years. Colliders are not conterminous with physics, you know. Some of the most exciting current research into things like condensed matter and slow light are basically table top.
So in the actual timescales of these things, taking maybe 10 years out to get people working on some stuff we really need - I suggested nuclear and solar power, but I'm sure there are others - is likely to make no difference at all to progress in physics, but could have many benefits in terms of energy security and climate change.
So, you're angry. But which of us is being shortsighted - someone who thinks resources should be deployed to ensure that we have the energy generating capacity to run things like colliders, or someone who thinks that identifying the Higgs Boson will suddenly revolutionise engineering?
Well, yes, I do still use coal. Owing to the design of my house and my use of an efficient, modern stove and ducting, I actually get better efficiency out of it than I do out of a gas boiler. So let's dispense with that argument.
Now let's dispense with your other analogy. I know the (mostly under 30s) posting on Slashdot don't like my argument (troll? I think not) but I have actually had P&L responsibility for some serious manufacturing plant, and I think I know more about this than you do.
Your analogy is completely flawed, because the LHC is nothing like a Lexus. A Lexus is a Toyota with a big price ticket, but we know what it does. You can read how fast it goes, how long it will last, you can test drive it. So it throws a tire. You know how much a new tire costs and it is didly squit compared to the cost of the Lexus.
Now take a realistic analogy. Up till now all anybody has ever built is a small car. Now a load of engineers propose to build a racing truck. It will be larger, faster, heavier and more expensive than anything built to date. They can't actually tell you for certain whether it will work. They roll out the prototype, and it promptly breaks. They tell you it will be easy to fix...months turns into a year and you start to suspect that won't be the end of it. Did it break because the design was flawed? They can't tell you. Will it break again the same way? They can't tell you.
If you were the VP engineering, you'd look at the other projects around that really could do with some attention, and you'd say "Why are we building this thing?"
The argument below about Faraday is equally misguided (incidentally, I was once a member of the RI, and the alternative version of that story is that he told Wellington, asked what use it was "I know not, but I warrant your Government will tax it". Faraday was doing basic research that needed little more than blacksmith skills. If, in the Napoleonic Wars, he had suggested getting the best blacksmiths in England to work on a really big electromagnet, taking years, how far would he have got? Not very.
The scientists who have worked out that it really will create planet-destroying black holes creep out and undo the repair work done during the day. Because if they simply publish their results the thing will be cancelled - and the people who lose their jobs will be really pissed.
Seriously, shouldn't we be mothballing this thing during a global recession? Its energy consumption and dust to dust cost makes the biggest truck-based SUV look like an economy car, and I'd rather the EU was spending my tax euros on something of more immediate consequence - like a new generation of nuclear reactors, or advanced solar power plants, both of which would, I imagine, employ the kind of engineers and engineering companies working on the LHC.
Whenever I used to visit Italy before the borders agreement, hotels and boarding houses used to take your passport away and record details that went to the police. As for Switzerland...I remember crossing on a small country road over the Jura once. One of our party had his passport in the trunk, and took several minutes to find it. This immediately caused the border guard to decide that he had been hoping to get across the border without showing it. We were held up for half an hour while, I think, they investigated his passport to see if it was fake (we could clearly see a UV light bring turned on and off in the border post). Thereafter, every time he went in or out of Switzerland, he was held up. Strangely, I never had any trouble.
I am seriously beginning to think all this "police state" stuff is actually a campaign by the BNP/UKIP. Civil Liberties in the UK are actually being threatened to some extent by the right wingers in the Government, but the "police state" stuff is wild exaggeration. And if the BNP/UKIP ever did form a government, how long would civil liberties last?
It helps to cite authors when posting - which I too should have done. The base assumption, i.e.that the Russell/Whitehead book is still current, and people would know that is the one referred to, is surely invalid. I was thinking at the time that Newton's book, on the other hand, is actually worth reading, in extracts, for 16-18 year olds because it is accessible once you work out the old notation. The Russell/Whitehead book is not. There is plenty of far better, more accessible material on foundations of maths. My pre-Cambridge reading list included stuff by Quine, Weyl, and Peano, and I got a lot more out of all of them.
Slashdot Mirror
You will find that all your points are being addressed. Why do you think there are research stations in Antarctica and Greenland? By the way, if you care to look at the thickness of the ice on the Antarctic or Greenland, you will I think agree that issues of topography and water table are somewhat irrelevant.
Max was vindicated when Pluto was downgraded a year or so ago, but so strong is the force of belief that some astronomers are sztill trying to reinstate it.
For the climate change deniers among you, this is how science is supposed to work. Scientist A says something, scientist B says "hang on my experiment gives different results", scientist A checks and says "sorry, yes, we goofed" and it gets fixed. This is exactly the opposite of religion, where Religious Bigot A says "the Earth is 6000 years old", scientists B through aleph-null say "hang on, geology, biology and astronomy confirm this is rubbish", and Religious Bigot A says "you lie, the Earth is 6000 years old."
There is a British "science writer" named Nigel Calder who claims that AGW is a huge fraud by the scientific establishment, and that counter-evidence is always suppressed. This little episode shows that Calder is speaking out of his anus, which means it may serve some useful purpose.
Research on Earth into dealing with external threats such as infalling asteroids or comets, dealing with diseases, dealing with our own inbuilt tendency to commit genocide, is far cheaper and more likely to pay dividends. Let's protect ourselves from disease and space rocks first, then we will be demonstrating our adaptability and survival skills. Running for the hills is monkey behavior, dealing with the predators may be what made us human in the first place. After all, we could realistically have a basic comet and asteroid shield by 2030.
I repeat: the idea of space colonies is currently not even science fiction, it's religion. Which was my original point.
Before the troll mods start up, please let me say I'm not objecting to exploring the Solar System in the slightest (in fact I think it's far more useful than the LHC). I am pointing out that your justification makes no scientific sense.
Don't believe me? Look at a working example, the Vectrix scooter. The drive part of the system is compact, in fact it fits in the rear wheel. No chains, no exhaust. The battery part is large, complex and expensive.
Successful batteries mean no longer wasting platinum on catalysts to clean up IC engine pollution. They mean quieter, cleaner cities. They mean much greater supply security. They mean that the Middle East ceases to be the major danger point for world security, as the US stops worrying about oil supplies.
Don't thank me, thank Newton (who is probably currently revolving in his grave at about 3600rpm).
To allow respectable recreational boaters over 50 to be armed with twin torpedo tubes and surface-to-air missiles. As the NRA keeps telling you, an armed society is a polite society.
I guess nobody responding to this post actually knows a damn thing about real world conditions. Fifteen metres above sea level enormously expands your range of vision. Ask any sailor.
One of the earliest uses for balloons and large kites was to tow an elevated observer behind a ship. I guess navies will be extremely interested in this. It's much less visible than a helicopter, cheaper, and safer, yet it permits over-the-horizon observation. Think of pirates off Somalia. Currently they can easily see and avoid ships, but fast patrol boats can't see them beyond a few miles. With one of these a small intercept craft can see the pirates, while remaining almost invisible themselves. Think of it as a floating artillery OP and the uses are obvious.
Unfortunately this isn't really evidence of anything, as grasses contain large amounts of silica, presumably for strength and protection. Whether an organism goes down the calcium carbonate or the silica route depends on its habitat. Oysters are "largely calcium carbonate", but they are definitely not a calcium-based life form.
Many people in the UK believe that Trident is an expensively useless deterrent. Sarkozy said Brown had no idea how to fix the economic crisis. Soon after, there is a submarine collision. Brown was trying to upset Sarkozy while pandering to the right-wing UK tabloids and justifying the cost by using Trident to take on the French. Unfortunately, budget cuts mean that Trident subs are now crewed by mothers of private school kids whose only driving experience is using their Range-Rovers and Grand Cherokees to push poor people off the pavement. There could only be one outcome.
Lots of printers use PowerPC in the low-clock versions. Basically PowerPC was a success everywhere it didn't have to run X86 applications. The PowerPC/X86 thing is a bit like the gas/Diesel engine thing; US consumers think Diesel is the inferior technology because their auto industry fixated on spark ignition early on, and then all the technical, marketing and political decisions were taken with spark ignition in mind. But in the world as a whole, everything from generators to bulk carriers runs on Diesel, it's just that Joe Public is rarely aware of it.
I had to issue a takedown notice last year when I discovered that a fake business had stolen the identity of our legitimate business. As a result, we could have been raided by the police and had our equipment taken by them, which could have driven us out of business. The initial response of the website host was to go away. Before I could respond to this, which would have involved a High Court injunction, they obviously took legal advice and I suddenly got a grovel. So I am sympathetic to legitimate takedowns. As you say, part of this one was legitimate. But L&L should have done better than have it drafted by a paralegal, and simply insisted that the genuinely infringing material be removed or fixed, and requested as a matter of courtesy that the blog confine itself to technical matters. Despite their claims to the contrary, lawyers are frequently not the shiniest apples in the barrel.
When we moved to our present house in a small English town, over 20 years ago, our smallest child wandered off down the road and fell over. Very shortly afterwards, an elderly lady emerged from her house, put a plaster on her knee, said "You must belong to the people who moved into X's house" and returned her to us. That's the kind of society I prefer to live in. If it means a measure of censorship of publicly available material, I'd rather have that, quite honestly. My youngest daughter now works with children in an inner city environment and is appalled by how, despite their access to "extreme" material, their lives are actually very culturally impoverished.
The meta-message of the old comics to children was, in fact, that people in uniforms could generally be trusted and that they were people working to make society safe. That's quite a positive message.
If anything, the real issue with netbooks is that they are too good for the industry model. They make the majority of laptops look just too big, expensive and heavy. How many CIOs are wondering how many of their sales force really need Thinkpads and could get by quite happily with a netbook, a bluetooth mouse and a small projector? With the same technology in thin clients or low power desktops, you can do everything real users need, give the execs their Asus Lamborghinis or their Macbook Airs, and still save a lot of money at the next refresh.
As noted above, the answer to performance issues is to start fixing bloatware. Microsoft shareholders are rightly asking why so much money goes on very, very speculative R&D, but perhaps they should be asking what would happen if the same effort went into redesigning Office so that (a) it worked really fast on small low power computers and (b) the user interface was properly tailored for small screens. It can be done - Chrome makes more efficient use of small screen real estate than Firefox does, but some real investment could, I'm sure, make the whole thing so much better.
Out there, the real world is suddenly discovering that small cars are more economical, easier to drive and park than big ones, that big houses cost a lot to heat and cool, and that in general despite what marketing tries to tell you bigger is just bigger, not automatically better.
Fortunately, Government funding bodies have more sense than the average Slashdot poster.
Incidentally, though I consider their views nonsensical, the right-wing think tank the Cato Institute thinks Governments should not use taxpayer money for R&D at all.
How come I posted this on Slashdot?
More than 50 years old, and anyway didn't arise from collider research. Try again.
So in the actual timescales of these things, taking maybe 10 years out to get people working on some stuff we really need - I suggested nuclear and solar power, but I'm sure there are others - is likely to make no difference at all to progress in physics, but could have many benefits in terms of energy security and climate change.
So, you're angry. But which of us is being shortsighted - someone who thinks resources should be deployed to ensure that we have the energy generating capacity to run things like colliders, or someone who thinks that identifying the Higgs Boson will suddenly revolutionise engineering?
As for Faraday - see my reply above.
Now let's dispense with your other analogy. I know the (mostly under 30s) posting on Slashdot don't like my argument (troll? I think not) but I have actually had P&L responsibility for some serious manufacturing plant, and I think I know more about this than you do.
Your analogy is completely flawed, because the LHC is nothing like a Lexus. A Lexus is a Toyota with a big price ticket, but we know what it does. You can read how fast it goes, how long it will last, you can test drive it. So it throws a tire. You know how much a new tire costs and it is didly squit compared to the cost of the Lexus.
Now take a realistic analogy. Up till now all anybody has ever built is a small car. Now a load of engineers propose to build a racing truck. It will be larger, faster, heavier and more expensive than anything built to date. They can't actually tell you for certain whether it will work. They roll out the prototype, and it promptly breaks. They tell you it will be easy to fix...months turns into a year and you start to suspect that won't be the end of it. Did it break because the design was flawed? They can't tell you. Will it break again the same way? They can't tell you.
If you were the VP engineering, you'd look at the other projects around that really could do with some attention, and you'd say "Why are we building this thing?"
The argument below about Faraday is equally misguided (incidentally, I was once a member of the RI, and the alternative version of that story is that he told Wellington, asked what use it was "I know not, but I warrant your Government will tax it". Faraday was doing basic research that needed little more than blacksmith skills. If, in the Napoleonic Wars, he had suggested getting the best blacksmiths in England to work on a really big electromagnet, taking years, how far would he have got? Not very.
Seriously, shouldn't we be mothballing this thing during a global recession? Its energy consumption and dust to dust cost makes the biggest truck-based SUV look like an economy car, and I'd rather the EU was spending my tax euros on something of more immediate consequence - like a new generation of nuclear reactors, or advanced solar power plants, both of which would, I imagine, employ the kind of engineers and engineering companies working on the LHC.
I am seriously beginning to think all this "police state" stuff is actually a campaign by the BNP/UKIP. Civil Liberties in the UK are actually being threatened to some extent by the right wingers in the Government, but the "police state" stuff is wild exaggeration. And if the BNP/UKIP ever did form a government, how long would civil liberties last?
It helps to cite authors when posting - which I too should have done. The base assumption, i.e.that the Russell/Whitehead book is still current, and people would know that is the one referred to, is surely invalid. I was thinking at the time that Newton's book, on the other hand, is actually worth reading, in extracts, for 16-18 year olds because it is accessible once you work out the old notation. The Russell/Whitehead book is not. There is plenty of far better, more accessible material on foundations of maths. My pre-Cambridge reading list included stuff by Quine, Weyl, and Peano, and I got a lot more out of all of them.